What kind of scanners do they use in minilabs?

[Rudeofus]

I've used Nikon Coolscan V ED and Epson V700 for scanning 35mm neg and slide film, and it always takes me a while to make the results look good. Especially when I scanned neg strips with the Coolscan, grain literally killed many of my shots, especially if they contained darker areas.

And both scanners take hours to just scan in a whole roll of film.

Once I went to a cheezy minilab, and they just took the strip (all 36 negs), fed it in, and zip! the whole thing was scanned in a matter of a few seconds. The resolution was about 1500x1000, and the results absolutely stunning compared to unprocessed Coolscan results. For a few Euros more they offered me even larger resolution.

What kind of scanners are they using that they are so fast and grainless out of the box? Are these super expensive scanners which only minilabs can afford? Is it just their builtin post processing software which made the scans look almost grainless? Or is there a top secret turbo&grainfree button on my scanners which I haven't found yet?

 

[Bob Carnie]

The scanners that Mini Labs use are actually quite expensive and very powerful.
I bought a fuji 2500 front end scanner for 5K.
I am very happy with this unit for mid quality scans of roll film.We do not make prints with a back end unit.

These systems new are over 200 thousand dollars to buy and the scanners are great.

The scanners are part of the printing system . Noritsu Fuji, all excellent quality and very fast.
We use this system for scanning roll film colour and black and white to provide our clients with Cd.
the scanners have different scanning resolutions.
Fast Jpeg gives around a 6mb flatten tiff file.
Slow Jpeg gives around a 40 mb flatten tiff file.

 

[pellicle]

Nikons (while praised) are not the speed demons you can get. We have some seriously fast stuff at my workplace

but we are doing mass digitization of books and newspapers, so we need the speed

 

[Bob Carnie]

What kind of scanner is that??

Nikons (while praised) are not the speed demons you can get. We have some seriously fast stuff at my workplace

but we are doing mass digitization of books and newspapers, so we need the speed

 

[pellicle]

Bob

its the Eclipse ... we have just phased it out because we were having trouble with jams when splices weren't perfect.

Its this one http://www.ristech.ca/eclipse-plus-production-film-scanner.html

 

[Bob Carnie]

Looks like a very specialized niche company , very cool, I am interested in scanning large volumes of film, 35 and 120 that has been cut in strips.
I bought a fuji 2500 for this purpose but it is quite cumbersome to use and we are always on the lookout for roll film scanners with current software and hardware.
thanks

Bob

its the Eclipse ... we have just phased it out because we were having trouble with jams when splices weren't perfect.

Its this one http://www.ristech.ca/eclipse-plus-production-film-scanner.html

 

[wblynch]

I have a Pakon F235 scanner circa 2002 that works great. I bought it used on ebay and it can scan a whole roll of 36 frames in about 5 minutes (at its highest resolution and with Digital ICE turned on)

It is only 2000 dpi so my scans are just under 3000x2000. But they come out great and with the Digital ICE I save tons of time over my old Canon 6-frame film scanner.

I must add though that this scanner appears to only work with Windows XP and requires particular setup where a hard drive partition is dedicated to the scanner.

What makes it great though is it has an archive of scans that you can retrieve for some time without having to go back to the negative.

Also, the scanner will save files in JPG, TIFF or RAW with only a button click and no need to rescan the negatives.

It's complicated to set up and it is a noisy machine, but once you've got it sorted out you can fly through the scanning process.