Okay, my move is nearly complete and I'm online again. Expect interesting stuff... soon.
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The older kids hear "You look just like your mother!" a lot. Grandma's not the only one that thinks their little brother resembles the friendly mailman that had their route eight years ago. 1971
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"I thought you were bringing the merch for our booth. I didn't bring it!" 1980
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What your life will look like in fourty years, or mine by next Christmas.
1979
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This is Annette. Not that one, a different one.
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The hippopotamus is the world's deadliest large land mammal, killing an estimated 500 people per year in Africa. Hippos are aggressive creatures, and they have very sharp teeth. Plus they will sit on you.
1984
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This gawddamned city keeps following me everywhere I go. 1971
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stop me before I scan again!!
So yesterday, it happened again... I was in a thrift and found a Pacific Image Electronics "ImageBox Standalone 9mpx" photo scanner. And it was the color of the day so was half off. :-D
It's a fascinating bit of electronics that does not require a computer because it can save to an SD card, but can be plugged into a USB port for easier access, plus it comes with a stereo-to-RCA cable so it can also be plugged into a television/VHS/DVD/Commodore 64 monitor/etcetera for direct viewing on a larger screen. It didn't come with the manual, that was the only thing missing, but the interface is fairly intuitive about most things. Here's a photo directly down into the unit to show it has two sensors:
Notice in the first photo below the two silver buttons is a slider for choosing between Photo (for the slide and 35mm film templates in the lid, 9mpx and 2400dpi) and Film (paper photos put on the scanner glass, around 4mpx and under 600dpi); that slides the appropriate sensor within into the center of the portal. Also with that slide comes a context-sensitive onscreen menu for setting how many megapixels to use (12mpx is an option so that has to be interpolated), contrast, timing for display and hibernation, original image size for paper photos, and MagicTouch dust removal for slides/negatives, among other tweaks and conditions.
But how well does it work?
Let's start with a paper photograph. As you can see in this side-by-side of the original and the scan I won't be using it for that. The photo is pretty bright as it is, so the default contrast of 0 was too dark and +2 washed it out. As one reviewer said, "it's great for unimportant photos."
Nice thought though. I don't have any 35mm negatives laying around at the moment so let's just work with slides. Here's a test scan, the one where I determined that setting the contrast to -2 looked a lot better because it brought out details the others blew out.
Fairly impressive, and the dimensions are 3232x2144 so there's plenty to work with. I haven't scanned this slide I found the other day with the flatbed so I don't know how 'true' this image is.
Let's back to that MagicTouch dust removal feature, which appears to provide ICE-style infrared cleaning. Here's where I say that for prints and unTouched images it takes five seconds to scan, while with MagicTouch the screen puts up a dialog saying "this may take 45 seconds" and it actually does.
(I selected a commercial tourist slide, never mind the color shift from being 50-60 years old on cheap stock, because it was visibly dusty.)
MagicTouch does the job pretty well, and is a feature I wouldn't have expected on a sensor-based scanner. Looks like I have something for those quick scans that for film produces images considerably better than the F2D Mighty's work for 1/5 of the price. It's not anything I'd be using for scanning most print photos, it's ill-equipped for quality.
So yeah, yet another new toy.
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So today's laugh: A local thriftstore put two mostly-full boxes of slide carousels ("gardens" says the label, and they were) together with a Vivatar slide projector. Wrap in tape, slap on a $40 price sticker.
Thing is, this projector uses magazine trays, not carousels...
...such as this, which was not at the thriftstore.
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I have several photos of Tami over the years and these are from 1974.
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