Polaroid Pro Palette 8000 experience?

[Ergos]

Hello!
Thanks for your reply. I had already downloaded the manual. It says:

Dark, or pale colored horizontal lines across image: Make sure the recorder is properly grounded (including extensions and multiple outlet strips), use only the cables supplied with the recorder, and protect the unit from bumps and vibrations during exposure.

it should be grounded. I used a different SCSI cable and a terminator on the second SCSI port. I used the SCSI cable with my drum scanner. It's fine.
The error, or rather the lines and glitches, vary greatly. I had also thought it might be a connection problem. The self-test is fine. Rasterplus runs perfectly on the Mac. I still have an older palette that works.
I will definitely take another look at the SCSI settings.

So far, I have only exposed colour. With a colour negative film, only a few images had stripes. The files are created as TIFFs. Is there a better file format? And what is the optimised size?

 

[koraks]

whether your SCSI addressing and termination is good. As you’ve noted, the images are sharp and well exposed, excepting the colour glitches, and so it may be some type of data flow error from your computer or software.

I don't think that's a plausible cause.
Termination and cable issues would result in problems like the machine not being consistently detected by the host computer, the connection becoming lost in the process and image output ceasing altogether, SCSI bus errors and insofar as you'd be seeing it in the form of data corruption, it would never involve neat horizontal bands like shown here, but more 'fuzzy noise' so to speak. This is not a cable or SCSI adapter problem.

The problem seems to be related to one or two colors periodically dropping out. Interestingly, it seems to be happening on a per-image basis since the lines don't run through consecutive images; they are specific to the image. (Which also emphasizes it's not the cable, since that would mean the intermittent contact issues would be exceedingly unlikely to neatly 'align' with the images!)

You'd have to look at how the image is being generated and then work your way backwards and list & eliminate possible causes. Since in principle all color channels do work most of the time, I'd expect the problem to be in the control of the color images and it might be associated (wild guess) with a bit of circuitry around a local memory buffer that temporarily stores a small amount of image data. It may be something simple as a poor solder contact on a one of the pins of a single memory chip, or a logic chip involved in an address line etc.. Again, that's a very wild guess.

 

[Ergos]

OK. Thanks for the information. It will be difficult to find the fault if I have to measure every component. Is there a circuit diagram?

Do you also use TIFF files? What size specifications do you use?

 

[clift_d]

I also use TIFF files saved without compression, but I’ve found that they need to be in the older Interleaved format rather than a Planar format for the driver software to parse them properly.

 

[Ergos]

Okay. And the image size?
Mine are 30 cm on the longest side at 300 dpi.

 

[Oliver Roch]

Just working on a small standalone print server that directly attaches to the scsi port of the ProPalette8000.
No more XP, RasterPlus, CFR needed.
Only a web browser required. First test roll is just drying and looks fantastic

Create multiple film rolls on server side storage...

Arrange, transform, .. the roll and save for later or process directly

Create, modify custom lookup table ...

 

[OrientPoint]

Just working on a small standalone print server that directly attaches to the scsi port of the ProPalette8000.
No more XP, RasterPlus, CFR needed.
Only a web browser required. First test roll is just drying and looks fantastic

Create multiple film rolls on server side storage...
View attachment 422221

Arrange, transform, .. the roll and save for later or process directly
View attachment 422222

Create, modify custom lookup table ...
View attachment 422220

That looks amazing! Is the code for this available?

 

[Ulrix]

That’s really impressive. What kind of hardware are you using?

 

[Ulrix]

And how did you create the LUTs?

 

[clift_d]

Just working on a small standalone print server that directly attaches to the scsi port of the ProPalette8000.
No more XP, RasterPlus, CFR needed.
Only a web browser required. First test roll is just drying and looks fantastic

Create multiple film rolls on server side storage...
View attachment 422221

Arrange, transform, .. the roll and save for later or process directly
View attachment 422222

Create, modify custom lookup table ...
View attachment 422220

That looks pretty cool. What kind of hardware are you using as the server - I'm guessing some kind of headless RaspberryPi setup?

 

[Oliver Roch]

I am still working on a easy and guided calibration process inside the app. Auto generated exposure targets, etc. and maybe an interface for xrites 810/811. Calibrating new film stock should be fast and simple.
As soon as i am happy / feature complete i'll think about going open source on github.
Development is done on an old T60 with SCSI PCMCIA card. Target system is a raspberry pi with scsi hardware.
Communication/Driver is written from scratch in Python. Speed is more then enough, i have to pace down not to fill the 8000 buffer to fast. 4k image is 60s per channel.
UI is FastAPI + vue.js, simple with no toolchain.
Everything is as simple as possible.
LUTs were taken from https://www.philpem.me.uk/code/filmrec/start and some i made already with the app itself.

 

[Oliver Roch]

I just released the command line interface for the ProPalette 8000: https://github.com/veroc/pp8k

 

[clift_d]

I just released the command line interface for the ProPalette 8000: https://github.com/veroc/pp8k

That's really fantastic. I did try out PiSCSI as a way of adding networked transfer of files to the Rasterplus print server on my Powerbook G4, but it never crossed my mind that the RPi + PiSCSI could act as the host machine.

Does your setup allow the RPi to run in a headless mode or does it require a keyboard / monitor? Could it for example function in a similar vane to something like an Octoprint server with a 3d printer, in that print files could be uploaded over a LAN using a web browser interface to remotely control the print server?

Also, what type of image formats does it require?

 

[clift_d]

I am still working on a easy and guided calibration process inside the app. Auto generated exposure targets, etc. and maybe an interface for xrites 810/811. Calibrating new film stock should be fast and simple.
As soon as i am happy / feature complete i'll think about going open source on github.
Development is done on an old T60 with SCSI PCMCIA card. Target system is a raspberry pi with scsi hardware.
Communication/Driver is written from scratch in Python. Speed is more then enough, i have to pace down not to fill the 8000 buffer to fast. 4k image is 60s per channel.
UI is FastAPI + vue.js, simple with no toolchain.
Everything is as simple as possible.
LUTs were taken from https://www.philpem.me.uk/code/filmrec/start and some i made already with the app itself.

Also, I did pull together a folder of PP8K film tables which included some that I believe were additional to the ones that Phil has on his website - the link to download this was posted in this thread previously but I've added it below for simplicity:

PP8K_COMBINED_TABLES

MediaFire is a simple to use free service that lets you put all your photos, documents, music, and video in a single place so you can access them anywhere and share them everywhere.

www.mediafire.com

 

[Oliver Roch]

Glad you like my work! Right now the Raspberry is running headless (PI OS Lite) and i use scp/ssh to copy and expose files on the recorder.
Adding some kind of hotfolder shouldn't be a problem. Maybe just open a smb share, ftp server, etc. and auto expose incoming files with something like:

#!/bin/bash
cd /home/youruser/hotfolder && mkdir -p processed
inotifywait -m -e close_write -e moved_to --format '%f' . | while read F
do
[ -f "$F" ] && pp8k expose 4 "$F" --film PLUSXPAN.FLM\> "processed/$F"
done

In order to be that flexible i extracted the whole device/exposure management into a cli tool. Now that the tool is quite stable, i can continue my work on the above mentioned web interface. It will also run on the Raspberry and you can access it on any computer within your wifi network at https://pipalette.local. The tool will handle 'roll' creation (like job queues in Rasterplus), curve editing (like with CFR) and a guided calibration process for new film stock.
The pp8k tool converts the image data into rasterlines via pillow upfront. Currently pillow supports > 30 image formats, so you can actually throw any image at it.

 

[clift_d]

I don't know that it needs to be a hot folder. -if the web interface had similar gui controls to what you've got in your images, for example an "+Add" button to allow files to be uploaded to build a roll for output, then that would work.

 

[Oliver Roch]

You can try the new application (early alpha ) at https://github.com/veroc/pipalette