Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Come to Jesus Christ today Jesus Christ is only way to heaven Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today John 3:16-21 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. Mark 1.15 15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. 2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Hebrews 11:6 6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Jesus
@@raycreveling1583 better! It's a motorized microfiche scanner. It takes sixteen 151mp images and merges them together so we can archive a whole fiche in one generic pass
A history of scanners? A technology that has never once interested me or ever made me wonder exactly how they work? But, CRD is explaining it to me in a hour forty minute video? Hell yeah BROTHER!!!! Count me in.
Apologies for the essay but as someone who works professionally in cultural heritage digitization, I greatly enjoyed this video and the effort put into filling some gaps in the history. I know the focus was intentionally on consumer technology (despite many interesting asides into the expensive professional stuff), and I enjoyed the flashbacks to stuff I used as a kid in the 90’s, but of course, today’s pro stuff is the consumer stuff of the future (often in a different and usually smaller form), so I thought you might be interested to know what’s happening in at least one sector of high end “scanning” today (we avoid the term scanning because we don’t use line-scan devices anymore, it’s all instantaneous capture, so we say “imaging/image” or “digitization/digitize” although those aren’t as catchy). Others have touched on some of this in earlier comments a little bit. One important point that has been mentioned is that scanner manufacturers didn’t stop improving them 10-15 years ago because the problem is solved and you just can’t get any better - I don’t know for sure why they didn’t keep developing them but given the timing of when flatbeds got as good as they ever got - around the same time that drum scanners and pseudo-drum scanners like the Imacon film scanners stopped being produced - I would guess it’s simply because there was no broad need for scanning anymore in the big-money professional printing context because so few things were not born-digital at that point (e.g. professional digital photography had gotten good enough to replace darkroom photography). So the scanners stayed the same because there wasn’t R&D money for them anymore, and because of some of the advantages they have, like not having a bayer filter, were still superior to digital cameras for a while so updating the technology maybe wasn’t necessary at first. But they are not actually very good at all in the 2020s sense of good digital image quality. The best digitization now is done with cameras, primarily Phase One 100- and 150-megapixel camera backs with specialized reproduction lenses (though you absolutely can get excellent results with less expensive cameras). Those setups cost within the realm of a $90,000 room-filling solution from the 80’s mentioned in the video… if you don’t adjust for inflation, i.e. you might spend 90K today for a Phase One digitization setup. So actually, especially considering the cheap computers and much less labor time needed, they’re actually significantly cheaper. I am not sure if any publishers etc. actually have them, though, because most stuff is born-digital, and any occasional need for digitization can be done by a vendor. But museums, libraries (I work in an academic library at a major university), archives, etc. (cultural heritage institutions) have them for digitizing all the old stuff, and image quality is absolutely critical - a big part of what we’re doing is preservation in case the originals are lost. The ideal (which I’m not sure we’re meeting yet, but getting close) is complete transparency - in the sense that there’s no visible trace of the optics or the sensor - no “character” (as is often desirable for creative photography, e.g. using vintage lenses), just pure and accurate reproduction data. Even the best modern flatbeds unfortunately have a lot of character, though it isn’t usually obvious without a direct comparison. If you do compare a scan from a top of the line modern flatbed to the same thing imaged with a Phase One system or similar, it’s night and day - even if you do 1200 or 2400 ppi on the flatbed and compare that to a 600 ppi Phase One image (600 ppi is the standard and the most common lenses used are optimized for that), because the lenses in the flatbeds just aren’t very good. This is even considering that the Phase One cameras have bayer filters - the color rendering is actually better too anyway (how, I don’t know specifically). Lenses that can do what a flatbed scanner lens does are a difficult optics problem and that they’re as good as they are for the price is seriously impressive. Better lenses designed for line-scan sensors definitely exist - that’s what’s inside an Imacon, which is a line scanner, for an obvious example - but for way more money. You’d probably have to quadruple the price of the already expensive high end flatbeds (like the v850 that was shown in the video) to put a significantly better lens in there (the lens is why flatbeds aren’t very good for smaller film formats). So there is kind of a market limit to flatbed quality, I guess. But, interestingly, there are high-end sheet-feed scanners that produce better results than flatbeds both in color reproduction and optical quality. One we use at work is made by Widetek; these are big scanners designed for blueprints and maps (which is what we use it for). Sheetfeeders have an inherent flaw of streaking, so we use the Widetek scanner for what we might call “access” images rather than “preservation” images, but again, streaking etc. aside, color and resolution are very good. I wanted to mention that because the feed mechanism is practically identical to the one in the Gray Scanner, with rollers, glass, etc. looking extremely similar, and you can get a more “transparent” reproduction out of it than with a flatbed - they’ve clearly been doing the R&D that Epson et al. stopped doing. Widetek does actually make a flatbed, which I haven’t tried but I suspect it may be better than most alternatives. By the way we also have high-end automatic-feed sheet feeders - image quality is surprisingly poor but they’re made for text documents primarily. They cost like $5-6000 but you can stack hundreds of pages on it and can expect that it will scan all of them correctly without double-dipping or jamming. Regarding drum scanners, we now have technology that can meet or beat them for film (for medium and small film formats anyway, for now). Pixel-shift images from a 100-megapixel Fujifilm GFX camera give you a 400-megapixel image and overcome the effects of the bayer filter, giving you true color for every one of those pixels. If your lens is good enough (not an easy feat) you can go well beyond 7000 ppi (the resolution of drum scans cited in the video), and it can be very important to do so to avoid “grain aliasing”, which depending on the specific film grain characteristics can rear its ugly head in the 4000-7000 ppi range especially. Anyway, the old overhead cameras shown a couple times in the video almost certainly were line-scan devices since large sensors wouldn’t have been available, so those were still “scanners”, and many of the similar-looking devices today (some of which have been mentioned by others in the comments) operate in the same way, for the same reasons - large sensors are still expensive. You could put a modern cell phone camera or similar in those (Samsung apparently has a 200-megapixel cell phone camera coming out) but you very quickly run into limitations basically imposed by optical physics - it just isn’t possible to make a sharp enough flat-field lens at that size for a small sensor. Most of those devices don’t have very good lenses as it is, though high end ones do have decent lenses. But I think devices like this are going to be the future of consumer scanning. Flatbeds still have advantages for now but compact/collapsible overhead camera style devices will be better for most uses once they get to the same cost/quality point that flatbeds are at, and at the higher end of the consumer market for such devices they will exceed flatbed quality. For digitizing film, that is already the realm of overhead camera capture at the high end and for many hobbyists. It doesn’t take a particularly high-end digital camera to be able to produce better “scans” than what the film lab can give you with their lab scanners (and Imacon type scanners), though lab scanners have a huge advantage in automation - for now. By the way, for archival film, you can’t put that in a drum scanner - the risk may be small, but because of the fluid mounting required, there is a risk especially with old already-deteriorating film (and that descriptor applies to almost everything older than the 1980s), not to mention how slow and labor-intensive it is for large collections… and the fact that it’s possible to meet or exceed the quality relatively easily with a single-capture overhead camera setup where the film can be mounted safely and quickly anyway. (Dedicated film scanners are way better than flatbeds for film because they have better lenses that can adjust focus, but even those will be beat in quality by good overhead camera capture.) Right now, high quality overhead cameras are expensive and somewhat esoteric. Flatbeds still are a thing for a very good reason for the consumer market. It’ll be interesting to see how exactly the consumer flatbed era will come to an end in the next 5-10 years, though.
Wow that's quite the history synopsis. Those were truly good times back in the day. When computers went mainstream in 80s it didn't have much peripherals but in 90s it was truly the golden era with parallel and serial interface hand scanners came out first but by mid 90s bed scanners were all the rage. Digital imaging and storage became possible and affordable. Good times.
You could argue that the consumer flatbed is basically already dead with modern smartphone cameras being good enough for most consumer uses. Software corrects a lot of the perspective issues and there's even special boxes with lights in them made for higher quality smartphone scanning. Traditional scanners are pretty much only relevant the realm of offices now rather than consumer or professional use.
@@DigitalMoonlight I agree. I owned a Umax flatbed scanner around 96 which was a big clunker then 05 got a slim Canon flatbed. There were other players like Epson but Umax and Canon owned that space. By 2009 the market peaked and by 2013 the consumer market was all but gone when phone cameras were good enough for documents. But it isn't just phone cameras that killed the market but rather documents all went digital. PDFs DocuSign e-mail for all receipts and contracts etc. The digital revolution eliminated the need for print so without print scanners became irrelevant.
You comment reminded me of when I spent happy years working at my college library. I remember optimizing the settings and placement of huge bound journals on an oversized flatbed scanner to do the best I could to perfect the image. I used that for ILL (Inter-Library Loan) and we would send the resulting digital file to the patron, or even print and mail it worldwide. I'm thankful that we only had to optimize for text and the occasional table/chart. I appreciate the work that digitizing archivists are doing to make knowledge accessible to different physical locations.
....... Do you know Jesus Christ can set you free from sins and save you from hell today Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell Come to Jesus Christ today Jesus Christ is only way to heaven Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today Romans 6.23 For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. John 3:16-21 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. Mark 1.15 15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. 2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Hebrews 11:6 6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Jesus
From an interview with Eugene Gordon: "I led the group that developed the CCD. We understood its importance for color cameras and understood its importance for facsimile machines. I asked Hugh Watson to make the first fax machine that utilized a CCD device. It was a flatbed scanner very similar to devices seen today. I tried to convince AT&T to get into the fax machine business, but they wouldn’t do it. " Watson's patent US3867569 was filed in 1974, so it predated Kurzweil's reading machine.
Hey Gravis! I'm a digital press tech in the production level space and you should know that halftoning is absolutely still a thing! In fact, the interface boards for the machines I work on that connect to the Raster Image Processor (RIP) workstation are literally called Halftone Boards. Digital presses are essentially giant laser/inkjet printers and primarily still use halftone techniques when creating images. Pretty easy to see if you take a modern print and put it under an eye loupe. One of the neat things though is halftone technique involves choosing the right screen for your print that changes things like dot shape, screen angle, dot size, etc to prevent print defects. One of the things digital presses can do is just select the properties of the "screens" at time of print on the RIP. There's honestly some really cool stuff once you get to production/commercial level printing!
Thanks for the info! I vaguely knew it was still in use but not a whole lot else - what are the DPI figures like nowadays? Is it still a lithographic process and the "printer" is just producing plates, or has the underlying "get the picture on the page" technique changed radically?
@@CathodeRayDude A pleasure! The main machine I work on uses a Fujifilm developed digital press engine and can go up to 2400x2400 dpi. Most of the digital presses I've worked on use the standard xerographic process involving photoreceptor drums or belts just like a desktop laser printer or walk up copier, just on a much larger scale plus with the addition of specialty toners such as silver, gold, clear, and fluorescents. Inkjet presses are similar to scaled up inkjet printers only they use massive non-moving printheads that the substrate passes under. One of the more interesting machines I've seen lately is HP's Indigo press that uses electrostatic inks and an intermediate blanket to smooth out the dots. Stuff gets pretty interesting in the production print industry!
@@CathodeRayDude I also work in prepress. My last two jobs we had offset presses that we imaged plates for. Our standard plate resolution was 2450 DPI and each plate is 1 bit CMYK The 1 bit color data was also sent to the press to speed the initial setup. The press would adjust mechanical "keys" across the width of the plate cylinder adjusting the amount of ink each area got before a single sheet was output. At my current job we have a Konica KM-1. It's a joint project between Komori (Printing press manufactures) and Konica Minolta (Digital imaging. The press is 1200x1200 UV inkjet and quality is stunning and I've been in the industry since the 90's. It takes a lot to blow me away at this point. Mechanically the press is very much a love child of two different industries. You have a traditional offset paper feed and delivery system with a high end inkjet sandwiched in-between.
At this year's DRUPA all major offset press manufacturers had jumped into digital. Some where just outsourcing, some did their own thing. But, most of them where inkjet. At least those in B2 and B1 sizes -Landa Nano and Koenig Bauer as and example, Agfa - wasn't attending but they also have demonstrated Agfa Speedset 1060 single pass B1 Press. Landa is Interesting, as they are printing with single pass inkjet on transfer belt and then transferring it to substrate, like in toner printers. (Landa preses is the braincild of Benny Landa, the same guy who invented HP indigo Process and later sold it to HP) I don't know how it's in electrostatic, probably specialised Raster Image boards are still used - as they are well well grained into industry and it's so convenient, when control workstation has to output only contone images, not separated 1bit tif's, but as PC processing power has got a lot better, in many cases rasterising is done in RIP workstation - press or plate setter already gets 1bit tiff thats allready halftone dots. And this is probably, why in some preses RIP boards are still a thing - PDF's cannot be rasterized in parallel manner, they have to be read in line by line, so no parallel processing - so best bet is fast single core performance that will spit out flat's and RIP board will get the raster dots out to the drum or inkjet heads. Multicore comes into play, if RIP licence allows to process few pages at a time. Anyway - One is to see digital press spewing out 11000 B1 sheets / hour, other that every sheet can be different - Knowing, how much processing needs to be done for it, it's twice as impressive.
@@FiizgetsTV Yeah RIP workstations have some pretty beefy processing power in them. IIRC the Fiery workstations we sold at Xerox had Xeon processors in them, however I was always irritated at how low the memory was specced and that they ran the job drives as a RAID 0. I'm with Fujifilm these days and got a nice up close look at the GC12500 and can't wait to work on it. That thing is a B2+ beast!
Scanners didn't change my life. TWAIN drivers changed my life ... FOR WORSE. VUESCAN actually changed my life. This little software packed ALL the scanners - all the 20 or 40 THOUSAND models of them - into a single driver that TRAMPLES over windows signed drivers, installs them anyway, and lets you use features that you didn't know you have, but it knows all the 6 models of CCD that the majority of table scanners had, and talks to them directly. I had a Canon usb-only scanner, no power cable. VUESCAN knew it could scan 2 independent photographs at once. Canon never shipped that feature on my scanner! But the CCD was there! Whoever did that program was PISSED, and I love him for it, all the 49.95 it cost was WORTH IT. And it ran your stuff on any windows, 10 inclusive.
Man, I wish I had known this years ago. I always hated the built-in "scanning software" OEMs required you use (because of course they never bothered with Windows API compatibility).
Fascinating. I will have to check this out. Petty and angry programmers sometimes make the best tools 😂 I've mostly been using NAPS2 which has a lot of flexibility but it uses the regular OS drivers.
Vuescan is an absolute _gem_ of a piece of software. I only encountered it as a way to keep an older, perfectly good flatbed scanner (LiDE 30 if you must know) working under Windows long after the manufacturer abandoned drivers for it, but it just... works.
Vuescan is an absolute marvel. Native Mac and Linux versions as well, by the way. I haven't tried it on Linux, but the Mac version also manages to do its thing without any of the driver signing getting in the way.
Oh yeah, you know, I should have been more specific! I don't know of any monochrome _camcorders_, but there were monochrome webcams, crappy low-cost digitals, and of course a couple much more recent monochrome "serious" cameras like the Leica and I think one or two others.
@@CathodeRayDudeThere was also the Kodak DCS 760 that mainly used a (CYGM?) CCD APS-H sensor, but they did also make a couple dozen (or hundred, I don't remember) with a monochrome sensor, called the 760M.
I owned a Leica Q2 Monochrom and I f***** loved it!! it was truly unbelievably sharp and it had extremely low noise, even at ISO 50,000 and 100,000. although I did eventually sell it because it felt irresponsible carrying around a $6000 camera everywhere with me. I still think about that camera all the time when I'm shooting black and white on other normal digital cameras.
Around 1995, I bought a UMAX 2200 SCSI scanner, supposedly on sale, for $1200. I remember spending hours playing with it, scanning pictures on it, and editing them. Because of its size and not having enough desk space, it found its way to the garage, where it sat for several years until it was sent to Goodwill. Thanks for bringing memories back.
I also bought a Umax which was the most popular brand then and I think I paid $300 in 97 and it was slow but worked. I thought it was revolutionary back then scanning in documents photos but it was slow. Takes a minute to scan a page but a full bed scanner was amazing for under $300 back then. Fun times.
I saw this video come out earlier today, but I decided to keep it, savor it for a special moment. Because I just finished watching "the debate", and I NEED CRD talking about old scanners for 100 minutes to revive me
There’s at least one “photographic” application for line-scan sensors: they are used to image boxes on conveyor belts, another application where the subject moves consistently in one direction. A major advantage is that they can image the bottom of a box through a narrow gap in the belt.
Some spacecraft use 1D sensors for photography as well. They're often called "push-broom imagers," because they generate the other dimension of the image by being swept across the landscape by some combination of optics and the spacecraft's own motion. The big advantage there (in addition to the cost savings for the sensor itself) is that you don't have to pay upmass costs for, supply power to, or provide temperature control for nearly as many sensor elements.
I love seeing words like "Quiet" and "Silent" on old dot matrix printers. In my experience (albeit from ancient childhood memories of the early-mid 90s), "Quiet" meant "you can technically operate this machine without ear plugs and not suffer permanent hearing damage".
Compared to daisy wheel printers, essentially electric typewriter without the keyboard, they were quieter, and some later 24 pin models had a load of foam inside the case that made them much quite than the earlier 9 pin printers.
@@martinlebl631not just "electric typewriter" high speed one that needed to whack the paper&platten like they personally offended it in order to keep up without greying out.
10:55 - The fun part of ISA is that until it became standardized as "ISA", _it ran at the CPU speed._ That means an original IBM PC ran it at 4.77 MHz, and the actual throughput was under 1 MB/s; while some early AT/286 clones might run it at 12 MHz. That accounts for the transfer speed differences. It wasn't until clone makers decided to actually standardize it that it settled on a fixed bus speed that accounted for the 8 MB/s transfer speed (on the 16-bit bus at 8.33 MHz.) Note that IBM never standardized it while it was the primary bus. AT ran it at CPU speed, as did the ISA 8088 and 286 PS/2 models. Only after they abandoned Microchannel in the Pentium era did they adopt the clone-made-standard fixed 8 MHz bus. (And really, by the post-PS/2 era, all PCs were just clones, even when they were from IBM.)
On some motherboardsyou can overlook the cpu by overlooking the bus, but many cards can't go past 10MHz, but some will go till 16MHz quite happily. Especially useful on low clocked 386s, and V20 and V30 chips that often can't be overlooked otherwise. This often requires switch the crystals, so it was advanced magic even back in the day.
@@kargaroc386 AFAIK that's the case, yes. But it's such a slow frequency that there's a lot of leeway. A card won't suddenly stop working at 4.78MHz, for example.
When I was a kid, in the early 90s, we had an off brand flatbed. I was fascinated with it -- not because it was good, but because it was bad. The proprietary ISA card only recognized the scanner after randomly power cycling for 20 seconds. Among other frustrations. I would stand at the magazine rack while my mom bought groceries and pour over computer magazine reviews trying to answer the question "are all scanners like this?" The articles never gave much information besides specs like DPI. It was maddening. You're doing real fucking work here. Thank you.
This was so good. You're *so* good at working out which bits of a story to tell and which to elide, and presenting quite dry information as an interesting narrative.
In my last year of high school (93), our art department got its first scanner. Color, fortunately. The art teacher wanted to show our class and demo it near the end of a class, and I (being the computer nerd of the class) was allowed to actually test it in front of everyone using graphics software. While I was pretty good with computers, graphics in this kind of context was pretty new to me, and I (from a gamer perspective; and entering into the extreme 90s), set the scan resolution and color depth to the absolute max. This was substantially higher than the resolution of the monitor, it would have taken ten screens to show it all at once. Ten minutes later it had a one centimetre wide bar processed and visible on the screen as it filled it in from the top down. It probably would have taken a day to finish, assuming it didn't eventually cause an error. And the class ended. This is actually one of those anxiety based core memories that pops in my head at least once a month. When I did tech for HP scanners and printers, it was omnipresent. I'd actually forgotten it until the first day in training where we handled scanners. Maybe I can retroactively file a workman's comp claim for the trauma and anxiety. :) Fifteen years may be outside the statute of limitations. This memory is currently both a source of anxiety and also mirth.
This reminded me of the teacher calling on me to read in class in about year 8. Everyone was taking turns to read from whatever book we were studying, but the problem is I'm blind. It was simultaneously painful and hilarious to sit there with my laptop at full volume, reading to the class in classic Stephen Hawking TTS voice.
1:17:11 the technology for autochrome film was patented in 1903 and I'd say that definitely qualifies as colour film, but if you want to be even more pedantic we were taking colour photographs using Trichromes in the mid to late 1800's
Out of curiosity, I dug out my old copy of "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" (5th edition!) and it describes (at about a half page each) the old 4-bit unidirectional port, then two different types of bi-directional 8-bit ports on various PS/2 machines, and only then dives into EPP, ECP and IEEE 1284! It still comes in handy for a lot of esoteric stuff whenever I'm working on something vintage. No mention of scanners, though. It really doesn't talk about peripherals much.
As a teenager in the 90's I was one of the first people to have a colour scanner and a printer, as well as a copy of JSP paint shop pro. I was amazed at the possibilities. I did a presentation in my school about how I imaged a business where I scanned and re-touched photos for a living. For me, it was truly magical, the possibilities seemed endless.
37:30 You just unlocked a core memory for me. In school in the late 90s, I had a report with lots of images and charts in it, and I had to break the document up into two parts, and edit them on a floppy one part of the document at at time. We weren't allowed to copy files from the disk to the HDD on the shared computers, so the first time I saw all the pages of my final report assembled together at once was when I printed the final copy of it, one half at a time from floppy. I also distinctly remember splitting up MP2 and MP3 files onto multiple floppy sized archives so I can move them from one computer to another, by way of winzip multipart zip files. The worst experience of this I ever had to deal with was zipping up an AVI file into a multi part archive so I could transfer it to another computer. The 100 MB Zip Drive could hold about 90 MB of data, and I had to make 4 trips across campus to move the pieces one chunk at a time, because I had only 1 zip disk. My goodness those were the dark ages of computing compared to today.
Now some younger folk might be saying "Why couldn't you just buy multiple zip disks?" And sure, you could of, but each disk was like 10 dollars each and usually came in packs of 2 to 3. Accounting for inflation, that's like an extra ~$60 that wasn't needed.
@@Toonrick12 Initially they were more like $20ish. Definitely were a hard sell to have multiple. I remember when the product took off and the disk prices sank and I finally had two or three of my own, it was awesome!
I dislocated my knee today, within minutes of waking up. It's been a long one already. I can't tell you how nice it is to see this notification come up on my phone in contrast. Love love love this. Thank you, Gravis Cathode Ray. Thank you.
FYI, RS-232 serial ports did increase in speed as well. The ones in most 1980s computers maxed out at 9600 bps, but by the early '90s, faster UARTs allowed serial ports to increase to 115,200 bps, fast enough to transfer images from a low-res scanner or digital camera, and even for postage-stamp-quality video from an early webcam or video capture device.
Before USB, consumer grade scanners and early webcams generally used the parallel port, not the serial port. Worked perfectly fine at the time and was often more reliable than early USB stuff.
@@RobertLockhartMakesGames Actually... was 3 film technicolor ever common / the standard? Wasn't it replaced by a newer system rather quickly? But the technicolor name stuck or the company was still involved even after their system fell out of use? I could be wrong, but I think that's what I read the story was.
I'm gonna say something crazy but I actually really like the distortions that this scanner produces. That first scan of the beach and palmtrees was actually quite artistic. There is a whole community trying to emulate the old 35mm look and feel and I think this certainly achieves that. Very informative video for such an overlooked piece of technology.
In the 90's many (cheaper) manufacturers were using the SCSI logo to just mean "peripheral" or "peripheral connection". Many scanners came in SCSI or parallel or proprietary interface variants, so they probably just generalised the plastic moulding.
To add to that, some peripherals used a hybrid connection that used either parallel or SCSI depending on what it was being connected to. The ZipPlus drive from 1996 is the example I have that swaps between the two standards.
Scanners are unsung heroes. My wife had a major medical incident last year and it produced a ton of paper. I went on ebay, grabbed a decade old Fujitsu full duplex ADF scanner for around $60-$70. I had to replace the rollers which was a little more money and a mildly frustrating afternoon, but it was worth it to scan all that paper in a few hours instead of trying to do that with the basic thing on my all-in-one printer.
Some RUclips videos do wonderful things but make your life miserable in the process. Then there are those like the 1 hour 40 minute Cathode Ray Dude essays, which give you all the power with none of the headaches.
The Agfa 1212U was hands down the best scanner for the buck EVER. They sold em for DM 99,- (yes thats ~€ 49), it had USB and the best part: It had a very well written software (at least on OS9 / OSX). Also it was still that sort of scanner that had a lot of great mechanical parts to salvage: Dual linear rails, endstops, a nice 2-phase stepper. And a REALLY nice optical lens assembly (yes they still had those back then). I used to break out the lenses and use them for magnification tasks on my desktop. As a matter of fact, I still daily use the lens from said scanner!
I had a 1212u, it was actually the second scanner we tried, first had weird software issues. At the time I didn't think highly of the AGFA unit, but it was an excellent unit.
1:36:43 god bless the psychos who have a drum scanner in their home. That’s “Home Electron microscope” levels of geek I remember looking at Macworld product reviews for flatbeds as a lil tyke and drum scanners were always the reference photos that the best scanners only got close. I think it was 1200 dpi for a flatbed vs 4800 on a drum in the mid 90’s Also thanks for the bit about the different modes parallel cables could operate on. I’d managed to set the item in the bios incorrectly and my flatbed motor would vibrate horribly whenever I scanned anything. Very odd. And yes, USB changed everything.
See now I’m getting nostalgic for a time when adobe was ‘Hip’ and companies could have semi-viable businesses building plugin libraries like Kai’s Power Tools, and Apple was the permanent underdog
You can drive a fluorescent bulb like an F8T5 easily from a low voltage DC source - in fact this was often done in camping lights in the 80's and 90's. The bulb itself is only 8 watts, so you can drive it with a fairly small DC to AC inverter circuit. They would want to control it from the motherboard to maximise the lifespan of the bulb and avoid blackening the ends, and to control the warm up time. It would also make it easier for them to just swap the power supply out for different markets (as implied by the sticker on the bottom of the scanner), and likely the power supply is an off-the-shelf component used it many other things at the time.
I think you're on the right track. Not to mention, if an engineer has been tasked with value engineering, there's significant value in using a COTS light tube that you can buy at a hardware store both for manufacturer and owner.
Came to the comments to mention that the choice of light was almost certainly to cut costs and here people with actual knowledge are explaining just how clever the decision was.
Driving using DC/AC converter, the drive frequency can be much higher than 50/60Hz. Driving the lamp using tens to a hundred kHz could be so high that it does not interfere with imaging. Or it can be driven from mcu with a synchronous signal to imaging. Also the upconverter transformer using high frequencies is much smaller than a ballast. The high voltages are only at the output of the transformer, kept away from other electronics. Using high frequencies you dont need a typical starter and the lamp does not blink many times when starting up and creating lots of electromagnetic noise, that could crash nearby mcu.
We had that Logitech handheld scanner at high school in early 90s. I remember someone would scan Red Dwarf VHS covers and then recolor them in Paintbrush. Someone eventually stole it from the computer room and it was gone forever.
I currently own something called a Canon LiDe. While not a great one by any standards I'm impressed by the cost optimizations. It consists of a spiral rod down the middle of a plastic box, a glass sheet on top, and a carriage that travels along the rod. The thing is so cheap that it's put together entirely with double sided sticky tape, and the buttons for the front panel are mounted right on the carriage PCB and crawl away from the front panel once the scan is going. Pretty sure it also does the "3-pass" thing by blinking the LEDs as the color it gives off from the fixture does look weird to the naked eye.
It looked like that array of filters that gentleman had in his hand had cyan magenta and yellow gels in it, and I think that would make sense if what you're scanning is ink in those specific colors. That one scanner that has two sensors per color is probably a physical version of that two pass scanner that shifts the sensor, they found it easier or cheaper to get double the resolution by putting in two sensors per color and offsetting one a half pixel relative to the other than making a single sensor with twice as many pixels. The reason why those handheld roller scanners were useful was if you wanted to capture columns of text off of something like a newspaper or a magazine on the desk in front of you. You'd have to really fold a newspaper to fit it into a flatbed scanner, but the little handheld scanner would easily take in a column of text that's only a few inches wide. Another reason for document fed scanners was legal size documents, almost no flatbed scanners have a 14-in long glass, and if they do, they're spendy. Letter size was usually the limit because that got you not only the majority of printed documents but almost every printed format of photo and magazine, also the vast bulk of books. Basically the only thing you'd miss out on was legal documents and newspapers, as I discussed before with the hand scanners. Initially I had made like three long comments but I decided to delete them and try to be a little bit more concise. Love all the work you put in.
Hey, thanks for the input! Several people suggested that they might be CMYK filters; I wasn't sure because dichroic filters can look like complementary colors from off-axis. But you have a very good point - virtually all color documents will be using CMYK pigments, that seems natural when you put it that way. Good thinking on the dual sensor stripes bit too, that sounds like a reasonable explanation sans any proof. I tried looking up the specific sensor model but got zero google results, which was weird, since it's a Sony. You'd think that would come up.
I really enjoyed this entire trip through the history of computer scanners. For most of the past decade or two we take scanners for granted but in the 80s and early 90s it really was tech that took a lot of computing power to accomplish. I can still remember my first flatbed scanner. It was purchased in the fall of 99. I think it was a sub $200 Epson model. The scanner itself worked fairly well for scanning mostly text documents. However, it was one of the earlier USB scanners and USB support in Windows 98 was oftentimes a real nightmare! Getting it to behave under Windows XP was much easier!
Just in case you didn't already know, he's actually STILL doing videos on RUclips nearly 40 years later in his delightful characteristic style. The man is a legend.
You can't imagine how important and frustrating scanners have been to me in my 40 year IT career. I worked for a scientific organization during the transition from paper to digital, and all of that legacy paper needed carrying over. I procured everything, slide scanners, document scanners, large format scanners, and interfaces including parallel, SCSI, FireWire, USB, on and on. The last one I purchased was a very large format sheet feed scanner able to scan a full 48 inch quad topo map in about 1.5 seconds. It took my beath way, and cost around $20k, but it looks like it's down to $17k now.
Yep, they nearly all have dreadful descreening at the scanner end that you can’t turn off, detail thrown away before it even gets to the computer. Never tell you that in the sales blurb. Turn the resolution up and the scan ends up the same file size because all the extra captured nuances has been chucked away
@@pauledwards2817the older scanners which still work fine like applefirewire or early usb dont have that….and if you use proper scanning software and not the bundled sotware you can always control every aspect including getting RAW scans i use Scanfast which is free and or paid and is worth every penny
its horrible, I just made a jig where I position a page and then click a photo, its amazing what you can do with a proper set of lenses and a DLR camera.
On one hand, I know you're right that there isn't, like, a desired "look" for scanners, but on the other hand I know an artist who will sometimes do (or at least used to do) sketches and scan them with a fucked-up scanner that ends up giving the pictures both a lovely purple tint and some oddly beautiful scanning artifacts.
4:39 "Are printers boring? Absolutely! Can you get interested in them anyway if you're a huge nerd? you bet your ass" 😂 My favourite quote of this video
Especially when you get into the weird world of receipt printers. I have one I grabbed from work out of a Ticket Eater (the thing in an arcade that counts and shreds your tickets) that holds the paper internally while it's printing, then kicks it out when you send it the cut command. Had a friend help make a script to use it like a polaroid in VRChat, so that's fun.
As someone who used scanners in the early 90s, and still own a couple "higher end" early 90s scanners - no, "The Grey Scanner for Computer" is *NOT* out of the ordinary for the time. Even the aberrations were perfectly "normal" on low-to-medium end grayscale scanners of the day.
This was really fun, and I learned a lot. I think I kinda always wondered about this kind of stuff in the back of my head, but never actively though about it. Also, I really wanna see you and Technology Connections do a video series together. Also, I'd love to see that 3-sensor camera. Lastly, I greatly appreciate seeing deep-dive research vids on tech. I appreciate how much work probably went into this, and I'd love to see more every now and then.
As someone old enough to read a newspaper in the 90's. I can confirm, the prints always looked shit. And God forbid you needed to complete anything. Now you get a worse version of a bad print. And half of the page would have some gray or black on it.
Superb work!! I remember foaming at the mouth at the prospect of getting my first scanner back in the 90s. Fascinating insight into their history. Happy pride month dude 🌈
Fun fact: SCSI lives on in a contemporary implementation called iSCSI. It's the same protocol run over TCP/IP (aka SCSI over regular networking) instead of dedicated hardware. It is commonly used to host virtual hard disks for virtual machines running on server clusters. If one of the hypervisors (a computer designed to run multiple virtual computers) goes down, another can take on its workload almost immediately since it has access to the same storage as its brother.
Also still used for tape drives since [Serial] ATA is too dumb to deal with anything that doesn't work like a hard drive. Even optical drives use SCSI commands internally and tunnel it over SATA (ATAPI).
That sidebar on ultra high end scanners reminds me that I did come across one of those Palantir (not related to the present Palantir company) scanners. It was a big thing that had both a flat bed scanner as well as a sheet feeder. It had three 68030 processors to do the OCR thing, which it could do batch style if you wanted to spend all day scanning in documents and then all night converting the images to text. A neat trick with those was that if you powered up the scanner while holding two of the front panel buttons it would start playing Wagner's Flight of the Valkyries on the stepper motors.
Bro, you do not know how excited I got when I spotted this video. You don't know. I was vibrating. I love this stuff. If I had big money, I'd dump thousands on you to do a deep dive into the history of digitizing tablets. EDIT: I just got to the part where he said "No one can be interested in scanners..." and just went HA! WRONG! You have no idea of the depths of a dork that I am.
The earliest "desktop scanner" that I could find which even vaguely looked like the modern form factor was the Cognitronics System 70, which you can unearth a couple pictures of online. This was a limited remote OCR optical scanner from 1968 that fed in documents and transmitted scanned data over phone lines to be parsed out by Cognitronics' central computers on the other end, for all kinds of time sharing and operator fees. The device seems to have evolved over time. A picture I found from 1968 shows something that looks to be a front fed box, but by 1971 you had something more like an ADF. It was just an OCR device that transmitted over fax, but importantly it was a desktop device ("desk-top" in their own words) that scanned documents for the purpose of getting data into a computer, so I say it counts. And devices like it might explain the familiarity with a term like "flatbed scanner" by the early 80s.
@@CathodeRayDude Just ask them to write 'CRT monitor' on the box as given how previously every time you buy one of those expecting it to break it hasn't, perhaps you can keep your streak going.
Back in 1990, all I could afford was a hand scanner. Flatbed scanners were the stuff of dreams. I got a letter of recommendation from my boss for my next job. It was very flattering, except he spelled my name wrong. I couldn't get ahold of him for a correction, so I undertook to scan it and fix the spelling. If I do say so myself, it worked, and worked well.
It truly was. Those handheld scanners were affordable. You could get one for under $100 and it was great for partial scans but stitching a page together was a pain. Flatbed became affordable by 96 you can get Umax for under $300 which was a bargain back then.
My first was a 16 Mono 2.25" wide Hand Scanner, then a 4" 256 color 4" wide Hand Scanner, then a Flatbed legal sized Parallel color, then a FB SCSI, then a FB USB w/film scanner... latest is an Epson Ecotank ET-2840 color scanner/printer/copier that's very handy. Thanks for the Blast from the Past!
Oh my gods, a ScanPlus! My Dad had one of those back in the day. Slow as molasses and had scan quality about the same. 🤣 Based on the name on the chips, it looks like this was a Plustek product. They're actually still around today, and still in the scanning business. Who knew? Also, I have to know: Where did you get that Capstone shirt?
I also have a Fujitsu scan snap scanner, similar to yours, and it totally changed my document handling. The speed at which it processes the documents is outstanding. My very first scanner was one of those Logitech hand scanner things, which is utterly useless outside of any artistic endeavour, if you like images that look like they're wonky and melting that is. For years I put up with an Epson scanner, which works fine but Windows constantly uninstalls the drivers because they are "incompatible" with windows (forcing them to install makes them work just fine). Since as you say nothing has changed in scanners really, Epson clearly have a deal with Microsoft force their customers to purchase the same product again for no reason other than they know there's no reason for them to buy a new scanner otherwise. I hate Epson and refuse to buy anything from them ever again.
Ex ZEoft employee. PC Paintbrush was shipped as an option with mice, scanners, printers and monitors. For Windows 95, Microsoft insisted that they were going to buy the source for PC Paintbrush. They modified it slightly, and have been shipping it as Microsoft Paint ever since. I was the person that did the work to get it running with Windows 95.
I've watched this three times already between this version and the original, and I still giggle at the image facing up at 18:05 (even though it was corrected seconds later)
Unintentionally showing off yet another reason the flatbed is a great design, its pretty much impossible to accidentally put the paper in the wrong way
According to Wikipedia, the IEEE 1284 standard parallel port (the enhanced version of the original IBM PC parallel port) which showed up around 1994 is capable of about 2.5 megabytes/second data transfer - fast enough to be reasonable for desktop scanning. In addition to printers and scanners, it was also used for things like zip drives, which addressed the issue of getting your graphic files and desktop publishing documents containing graphics from one computer to another (or to a printing service), when the files were too large for floppies.
Multi-pass scanning didn't entirely go away - It is still used for doing infrared scans for the scratch/dust removal features (Digital ICE/FARE and similar), and also for multi-exposure scans. Interesting though that the current consumer flatbed scanners seem to have basically barely if at all changed for the like last 10 years now, the current epson and canon models are essentially the same with at most just some minor packaging and software changes - and some of epsons models are the exact same they have been selling for more than 10 years now.
And then there was that one windows 7 64 bit update which suddenly rendered most older scanners useless since their software could no longer communicate with their hardware. Most people didn't know and just assumed their old scanner finally broke and realized the new all-in-one printer-scanners could not match the quality of the old one.
I remember the early days of "handheld scanners". This is already advanced tech. And the quality is about what I would expect from a gray scale scanner from that era.
That Logitec palm scanner came out around 1995. I know because I bought one. It wasn't anything niche, just a cheaper way to make a scanner. It just needed the software it came with and you would scan a document in stripes and 'stitch' the stripes together with the software. I remember I knocked it off the table and cracked the clear plastic widow it scanned through. I contacted Logitec to see if I could buy a replacement window (I freely admitted I broke it) and the cs rep said they didn't know but they'd ask their boss and get back to me so I gave them my info. about a week later just as I was thinking they'd blown me off I got a replacement in the mail in a small bubble mailer without any request to pay for it or anything just a simple note saying they hoped this fixed my scanner.
My father was constantly in search of a better scanner. first for his art and later for various projects like shirt, mug, plate etc. We started with the handheld grayscale ScanMan and virtually had a new scanner every year or two all through the 90s and 00s. Various bulb technologies, interfaces and resolution jumps were constantly driving new purchases. Rarely did they live up to the marketing and often they were flat out lies. Often the biggest difference between models was the bundled software. I remember the 600DPI color one he bought came complete with full versions of Photoshop and (I believe) Adobe Acrobat, the scanner itself cost less than the Photoshop License so I have no idea how that one worked financially for them.
I’ve been using flatbed scanners since the early nineties in my job in desktop publishing. From the greyscale flatbed that we bought with our first Macintosh, to the high end drum scanner in the noughties and tens. Then back to flatbeds on our all-in-ones when everyone stopped using film cameras. The patterns that you’re seeing on some of your images could be an interference pattern or clash between the pixels in the image and the halftone dots of the printed “original” being scanned. This pattern is known as “Moire”. It is something that we still have to deal with to this day
I can't say anything for certain because it's been a few years, but I remember my family's canon printer/scanner/copier/fax machine (Canon MX330, I believe) was so absolutely much slower on Color scanning that we would just scan the majority of things in grayscale. Sure, we'd nearly always copy and print in grayscale because it was so much cheaper, but I'm 100% sure we'd _scan_ in grayscale as well just because it was so much faster. This was in the 2010s. I actually picked up a discarded HP scanner and tested it for the first time, but I realized I was making a color scan and instantly went "oops!" and instinctively reached to cancel the scan, only to be _blown away_ that it did a full color scan _so fast_ I barely had time to reach for my mouse. I don't know if it's true or not, but I had just taken it for granted that all or at least most color scanners just made three passes like I assumed ours must have to be that slow. But I don't know, maybe I'm somehow totally misremembering and our scanner wasn't that slow in color (I'm pretty sure it was) or maybe I'm totally wrong about _why_ it was so slow. I also seem to remember that color scans tended to show up green around the page instead of white, for some reason.
1:14:45 I looked up the address for HP given here just out of curiosity and it used to be HP's Advanced Products Division. They designed the HP-35 and some other business calculators and apparently pivoted to scanners at some point after the 70s. Interestingly that road no longer exists as it's now Apple Park Way and the building was demolished for the huge new campus.
Back in ‘87 I was working for a laser printer company and a large part of our market was the desktop publishing industry. By the late 80s there were much higher resolution monitors around although they also used dedicated cards to drive them. Yes, scanning was slow and cumbersome and always used the parallel port. A late 80s laser printer was expensive but we sold a lot of them to businesses because of the print quality and speed. They also were not obnoxiously loud in an office environment which is a big deal. A laser printer from the day would produce pretty good quality prints, and in 1988 we started using Canon colour photocopier hardware that could absolutely copy and print full colour photo images at 300+dpi. A lot of the copier tech was used by laser printer companies - since a laser printer is basically a photocopier with a different controller board. Our printers used Canon copiers from 1985 or so, as did most of the industry. The scanning tech on the colour photocopier was impressive and of course a standard test that we’d show off was to copy our Australian bank notes. There was no way that you’d mistake one for the real thing if printed though because the prints were very glossy and waxy affairs. I left that company in ‘89 and my next company also had some scanning tech that we sold into the DTP market. Quite expensive, full length cards that occupied two slots on an XT and often dedicated SCSI cards to drive the scanners. Still very slow but the biggest issue was actually the amount of disk storage needed for the images. JPEG had not been invented yet and a common HDD was 20MB, so there really were limitations on what you could do. For reference my home machine in 1990 was a very expensive machine only possible because of where I worked, but was a 20MHz 386DX with two 40MB ST-506 drives with RLL driver cards that improved speed and capacity. For most people a home machine with 80MB of disk space and a laser printer that retailed for circa $5000 was out of reach. Later in the early 90s I managed to score a massive EIZO monitor at work that required dedicated hardware to drive. I can’t remember the resolution but it would have been around a 20” screen. It was a leftover from the earlier DTP market and the compromise was that I had to surrender it for use any time we were doing a trade show as it was the biggest monitor around.
Oh man, this takes me back... I remember that once upon a time in the very early '90s I used to give my drawings to a friend from school who had a fax machine at their parents business, while I had a modem. This is how I scanned my stuff: Over a landline! :D Soon after I got one of those hand held grey scale scanners and it was a pain in the butt to use it on my 386: Pull that thing too fast it would skip lines and produce images with missing portions, or you'd get wobbly lines and stuff, it was a nightmare. First flatbed scanner I got was around 1995, a very very cheap thing, but still way more useable than that handheld thing. Funny thing is, that flatbed monster is still supported in sane, so I could use it on my modern Linux machine 30 years later, while the Windows driver stopped working a long time ago, around 2000... ;-)
The mirrors are there to fold the optical path, as that sensor has a very long focal distance, so they need to use mirrors to make the path shorter. The sensor was originally designed for fax and copier machines, where there was room for a long optical path to it, as they were large machines. The long path was to enable the use of cheap spherical optics, as otherwise you would need much more complex lenses, read much much more expensive ones, and they cost a lot more than simple spherical ground and polished lenses, and you need to also use a stack of them glued together to make up the right refractive index variation across the focal plane. Longer lens path and cheap lens is a lot cheaper. The small plate is there to remove light that would otherwise be entering the sensor, because the folded path from the scanner platen does not block all of it completely, so the plate is there to intercept the light. CFL drive is a simple Royer oscillator system, used to drive millions of tubes in portable lights, and works by having a pair of windings to drive the heaters, and then a much longer winding to generate 100VAC to drive the actual discharge. Not great for tube life, but again, as it only runs for 30 seconds at a time, not too much of an issue, and those tubes would run 1000 hours in use, and then need replacing. A lot of scanner manufacturers used them, though the better manufacturers (Arcus for one) would sell you the right spectrally matched tubes, which were made by Phillips in Eindhoven specially for them, though at a pinch you could use a regular Phillips cool white and get reasonable results.
Single-chip is actually starting to be adopted in the latest generation of television cameras. CMOS sensors are so high resolution now, and sensitive enough at that resolution, that they can just stick in a very high resolution chip and use a Bayer filter without the artifacting.
I like to think that the thunder scan for Apple II is one of the earliest consumer scanners. It was just an optical detector that you put into your dot-matrix printer and let the printer do the mechanical work of scanning a picture, one dot at a time.
I kind of like the messed up gray scale image, kind of reminds me of something you would find ruffling through a file cabinet in a horror game. The streaking gives it a kind of character
Gotta say, in the early 90s we used a handheld logitech scanman grayscale scanner to insert film photos in our troop's newsletter. It worked surprisingly well for anything the size of a 6x4 print or smaller. Stitching anything larger on the other hand was a nightmare.
Obligatory "I'm glad you're experimenting with short-form content" comment
Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Come to Jesus Christ today
Jesus Christ is only way to heaven
Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void
Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today
Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today
John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Hebrews 11:6
6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Jesus
This is short form..?
@@Dollar_CoinYTthats-the-joke.gif
No, and thats the joke. @@Dollar_CoinYT
Feels like he's not making an effort.. At all
I'm watching this while operating a scanner that costs 60k$+ and takes 2.4 gigapixel images. So I'm questioning how intrinsically boring they are! :)
Drum scanner?
@@raycreveling1583 better! It's a motorized microfiche scanner. It takes sixteen 151mp images and merges them together so we can archive a whole fiche in one generic pass
For what purpose?
@@NickRuedig scanning Supreme Court microfiche for the Internet Archive
@@FooneTuring Legitimately, thank you for your service!
That's also very cool, and explains why gigapixel resolution would be necessary. Thanks! 👍
Don't worry, 100 minutes is a perfect size for a video. They shouldn't even make videos smaller than that!
ah hahaha. ah hahaha. funny guy.
yes, it should be illegal. plus, they should have at least one image of a cat in it.
@@chaoticsystem2211why not two of them?
@@LKComputes There's a saying in French that says: never 2 without 3.
@@AdamScottPersonnel 3 isn't enough 4 is
Spending half an hour troubleshooting just to find out there's no disk space is literally my proxmox journey.
Also me from the past
Also me
Feel that one
Also me
A history of scanners? A technology that has never once interested me or ever made me wonder exactly how they work? But, CRD is explaining it to me in a hour forty minute video? Hell yeah BROTHER!!!! Count me in.
Brother, Pun intended? haha
Apologies for the essay but as someone who works professionally in cultural heritage digitization, I greatly enjoyed this video and the effort put into filling some gaps in the history. I know the focus was intentionally on consumer technology (despite many interesting asides into the expensive professional stuff), and I enjoyed the flashbacks to stuff I used as a kid in the 90’s, but of course, today’s pro stuff is the consumer stuff of the future (often in a different and usually smaller form), so I thought you might be interested to know what’s happening in at least one sector of high end “scanning” today (we avoid the term scanning because we don’t use line-scan devices anymore, it’s all instantaneous capture, so we say “imaging/image” or “digitization/digitize” although those aren’t as catchy). Others have touched on some of this in earlier comments a little bit.
One important point that has been mentioned is that scanner manufacturers didn’t stop improving them 10-15 years ago because the problem is solved and you just can’t get any better - I don’t know for sure why they didn’t keep developing them but given the timing of when flatbeds got as good as they ever got - around the same time that drum scanners and pseudo-drum scanners like the Imacon film scanners stopped being produced - I would guess it’s simply because there was no broad need for scanning anymore in the big-money professional printing context because so few things were not born-digital at that point (e.g. professional digital photography had gotten good enough to replace darkroom photography).
So the scanners stayed the same because there wasn’t R&D money for them anymore, and because of some of the advantages they have, like not having a bayer filter, were still superior to digital cameras for a while so updating the technology maybe wasn’t necessary at first. But they are not actually very good at all in the 2020s sense of good digital image quality. The best digitization now is done with cameras, primarily Phase One 100- and 150-megapixel camera backs with specialized reproduction lenses (though you absolutely can get excellent results with less expensive cameras). Those setups cost within the realm of a $90,000 room-filling solution from the 80’s mentioned in the video… if you don’t adjust for inflation, i.e. you might spend 90K today for a Phase One digitization setup. So actually, especially considering the cheap computers and much less labor time needed, they’re actually significantly cheaper. I am not sure if any publishers etc. actually have them, though, because most stuff is born-digital, and any occasional need for digitization can be done by a vendor.
But museums, libraries (I work in an academic library at a major university), archives, etc. (cultural heritage institutions) have them for digitizing all the old stuff, and image quality is absolutely critical - a big part of what we’re doing is preservation in case the originals are lost. The ideal (which I’m not sure we’re meeting yet, but getting close) is complete transparency - in the sense that there’s no visible trace of the optics or the sensor - no “character” (as is often desirable for creative photography, e.g. using vintage lenses), just pure and accurate reproduction data.
Even the best modern flatbeds unfortunately have a lot of character, though it isn’t usually obvious without a direct comparison. If you do compare a scan from a top of the line modern flatbed to the same thing imaged with a Phase One system or similar, it’s night and day - even if you do 1200 or 2400 ppi on the flatbed and compare that to a 600 ppi Phase One image (600 ppi is the standard and the most common lenses used are optimized for that), because the lenses in the flatbeds just aren’t very good. This is even considering that the Phase One cameras have bayer filters - the color rendering is actually better too anyway (how, I don’t know specifically).
Lenses that can do what a flatbed scanner lens does are a difficult optics problem and that they’re as good as they are for the price is seriously impressive. Better lenses designed for line-scan sensors definitely exist - that’s what’s inside an Imacon, which is a line scanner, for an obvious example - but for way more money. You’d probably have to quadruple the price of the already expensive high end flatbeds (like the v850 that was shown in the video) to put a significantly better lens in there (the lens is why flatbeds aren’t very good for smaller film formats).
So there is kind of a market limit to flatbed quality, I guess. But, interestingly, there are high-end sheet-feed scanners that produce better results than flatbeds both in color reproduction and optical quality. One we use at work is made by Widetek; these are big scanners designed for blueprints and maps (which is what we use it for). Sheetfeeders have an inherent flaw of streaking, so we use the Widetek scanner for what we might call “access” images rather than “preservation” images, but again, streaking etc. aside, color and resolution are very good. I wanted to mention that because the feed mechanism is practically identical to the one in the Gray Scanner, with rollers, glass, etc. looking extremely similar, and you can get a more “transparent” reproduction out of it than with a flatbed - they’ve clearly been doing the R&D that Epson et al. stopped doing. Widetek does actually make a flatbed, which I haven’t tried but I suspect it may be better than most alternatives.
By the way we also have high-end automatic-feed sheet feeders - image quality is surprisingly poor but they’re made for text documents primarily. They cost like $5-6000 but you can stack hundreds of pages on it and can expect that it will scan all of them correctly without double-dipping or jamming.
Regarding drum scanners, we now have technology that can meet or beat them for film (for medium and small film formats anyway, for now). Pixel-shift images from a 100-megapixel Fujifilm GFX camera give you a 400-megapixel image and overcome the effects of the bayer filter, giving you true color for every one of those pixels. If your lens is good enough (not an easy feat) you can go well beyond 7000 ppi (the resolution of drum scans cited in the video), and it can be very important to do so to avoid “grain aliasing”, which depending on the specific film grain characteristics can rear its ugly head in the 4000-7000 ppi range especially.
Anyway, the old overhead cameras shown a couple times in the video almost certainly were line-scan devices since large sensors wouldn’t have been available, so those were still “scanners”, and many of the similar-looking devices today (some of which have been mentioned by others in the comments) operate in the same way, for the same reasons - large sensors are still expensive. You could put a modern cell phone camera or similar in those (Samsung apparently has a 200-megapixel cell phone camera coming out) but you very quickly run into limitations basically imposed by optical physics - it just isn’t possible to make a sharp enough flat-field lens at that size for a small sensor. Most of those devices don’t have very good lenses as it is, though high end ones do have decent lenses. But I think devices like this are going to be the future of consumer scanning. Flatbeds still have advantages for now but compact/collapsible overhead camera style devices will be better for most uses once they get to the same cost/quality point that flatbeds are at, and at the higher end of the consumer market for such devices they will exceed flatbed quality.
For digitizing film, that is already the realm of overhead camera capture at the high end and for many hobbyists. It doesn’t take a particularly high-end digital camera to be able to produce better “scans” than what the film lab can give you with their lab scanners (and Imacon type scanners), though lab scanners have a huge advantage in automation - for now.
By the way, for archival film, you can’t put that in a drum scanner - the risk may be small, but because of the fluid mounting required, there is a risk especially with old already-deteriorating film (and that descriptor applies to almost everything older than the 1980s), not to mention how slow and labor-intensive it is for large collections… and the fact that it’s possible to meet or exceed the quality relatively easily with a single-capture overhead camera setup where the film can be mounted safely and quickly anyway.
(Dedicated film scanners are way better than flatbeds for film because they have better lenses that can adjust focus, but even those will be beat in quality by good overhead camera capture.)
Right now, high quality overhead cameras are expensive and somewhat esoteric. Flatbeds still are a thing for a very good reason for the consumer market. It’ll be interesting to see how exactly the consumer flatbed era will come to an end in the next 5-10 years, though.
Wow that's quite the history synopsis. Those were truly good times back in the day. When computers went mainstream in 80s it didn't have much peripherals but in 90s it was truly the golden era with parallel and serial interface hand scanners came out first but by mid 90s bed scanners were all the rage. Digital imaging and storage became possible and affordable. Good times.
You could argue that the consumer flatbed is basically already dead with modern smartphone cameras being good enough for most consumer uses. Software corrects a lot of the perspective issues and there's even special boxes with lights in them made for higher quality smartphone scanning. Traditional scanners are pretty much only relevant the realm of offices now rather than consumer or professional use.
@@DigitalMoonlight I agree. I owned a Umax flatbed scanner around 96 which was a big clunker then 05 got a slim Canon flatbed. There were other players like Epson but Umax and Canon owned that space. By 2009 the market peaked and by 2013 the consumer market was all but gone when phone cameras were good enough for documents. But it isn't just phone cameras that killed the market but rather documents all went digital. PDFs DocuSign e-mail for all receipts and contracts etc. The digital revolution eliminated the need for print so without print scanners became irrelevant.
You comment reminded me of when I spent happy years working at my college library. I remember optimizing the settings and placement of huge bound journals on an oversized flatbed scanner to do the best I could to perfect the image. I used that for ILL (Inter-Library Loan) and we would send the resulting digital file to the patron, or even print and mail it worldwide.
I'm thankful that we only had to optimize for text and the occasional table/chart.
I appreciate the work that digitizing archivists are doing to make knowledge accessible to different physical locations.
"Gray scanner for computer," needs to be a t-shirt, and is going to be what I now call all old peripherals.
I would also buy a “Gay scanner for computer” variant in a rainbow font
I work in a lab and we sometimes call all the instruments "gray science box".
.......
Do you know Jesus Christ can set you free from sins and save you from hell today
Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven
There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today
Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell
Come to Jesus Christ today
Jesus Christ is only way to heaven
Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void
Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today
Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today
Romans 6.23
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Hebrews 11:6
6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Jesus
has big "pepsi for tv game" energy
I absolutely would wear that too lol@@scout8145
From an interview with Eugene Gordon:
"I led the group that developed the CCD. We understood its importance for color cameras and understood its importance for facsimile machines. I asked Hugh Watson to make the first fax machine that utilized a CCD device. It was a flatbed scanner very similar to devices seen today. I tried to convince AT&T to get into the fax machine business, but they wouldn’t do it. "
Watson's patent US3867569 was filed in 1974, so it predated Kurzweil's reading machine.
Yeah, strange like trying to get Kodak to think they were a lens/imaging/storage business not one just selling film and photo paper
"No one wants to go back to the past:
My brain: "He's gonna take you back to the past, to play with scanners that all suck ass..."
Avgn!
Too bad AVGN is a hack fraud. Used to love his stuff.
got no time to play with scanners, its 5:40
@@jonathanyang6230 Nobody tells me anything, I'm the balls on the dick.
@@Max............. I don't know James Rolfe.
Hey Gravis! I'm a digital press tech in the production level space and you should know that halftoning is absolutely still a thing! In fact, the interface boards for the machines I work on that connect to the Raster Image Processor (RIP) workstation are literally called Halftone Boards. Digital presses are essentially giant laser/inkjet printers and primarily still use halftone techniques when creating images. Pretty easy to see if you take a modern print and put it under an eye loupe. One of the neat things though is halftone technique involves choosing the right screen for your print that changes things like dot shape, screen angle, dot size, etc to prevent print defects. One of the things digital presses can do is just select the properties of the "screens" at time of print on the RIP. There's honestly some really cool stuff once you get to production/commercial level printing!
Thanks for the info! I vaguely knew it was still in use but not a whole lot else - what are the DPI figures like nowadays? Is it still a lithographic process and the "printer" is just producing plates, or has the underlying "get the picture on the page" technique changed radically?
@@CathodeRayDude A pleasure! The main machine I work on uses a Fujifilm developed digital press engine and can go up to 2400x2400 dpi. Most of the digital presses I've worked on use the standard xerographic process involving photoreceptor drums or belts just like a desktop laser printer or walk up copier, just on a much larger scale plus with the addition of specialty toners such as silver, gold, clear, and fluorescents. Inkjet presses are similar to scaled up inkjet printers only they use massive non-moving printheads that the substrate passes under. One of the more interesting machines I've seen lately is HP's Indigo press that uses electrostatic inks and an intermediate blanket to smooth out the dots. Stuff gets pretty interesting in the production print industry!
@@CathodeRayDude I also work in prepress. My last two jobs we had offset presses that we imaged plates for. Our standard plate resolution was 2450 DPI and each plate is 1 bit CMYK
The 1 bit color data was also sent to the press to speed the initial setup. The press would adjust mechanical "keys" across the width of the plate cylinder adjusting the amount of ink each area got before a single sheet was output.
At my current job we have a Konica KM-1. It's a joint project between Komori (Printing press manufactures) and Konica Minolta (Digital imaging.
The press is 1200x1200 UV inkjet and quality is stunning and I've been in the industry since the 90's. It takes a lot to blow me away at this point.
Mechanically the press is very much a love child of two different industries.
You have a traditional offset paper feed and delivery system with a high end inkjet sandwiched in-between.
At this year's DRUPA all major offset press manufacturers had jumped into digital. Some where just outsourcing, some did their own thing. But, most of them where inkjet. At least those in B2 and B1 sizes -Landa Nano and Koenig Bauer as and example, Agfa - wasn't attending but they also have demonstrated Agfa Speedset 1060 single pass B1 Press. Landa is Interesting, as they are printing with single pass inkjet on transfer belt and then transferring it to substrate, like in toner printers. (Landa preses is the braincild of Benny Landa, the same guy who invented HP indigo Process and later sold it to HP) I don't know how it's in electrostatic, probably specialised Raster Image boards are still used - as they are well well grained into industry and it's so convenient, when control workstation has to output only contone images, not separated 1bit tif's, but as PC processing power has got a lot better, in many cases rasterising is done in RIP workstation - press or plate setter already gets 1bit tiff thats allready halftone dots. And this is probably, why in some preses RIP boards are still a thing - PDF's cannot be rasterized in parallel manner, they have to be read in line by line, so no parallel processing - so best bet is fast single core performance that will spit out flat's and RIP board will get the raster dots out to the drum or inkjet heads. Multicore comes into play, if RIP licence allows to process few pages at a time. Anyway - One is to see digital press spewing out 11000 B1 sheets / hour, other that every sheet can be different - Knowing, how much processing needs to be done for it, it's twice as impressive.
@@FiizgetsTV Yeah RIP workstations have some pretty beefy processing power in them. IIRC the Fiery workstations we sold at Xerox had Xeon processors in them, however I was always irritated at how low the memory was specced and that they ran the job drives as a RAID 0. I'm with Fujifilm these days and got a nice up close look at the GC12500 and can't wait to work on it. That thing is a B2+ beast!
Scanners didn't change my life.
TWAIN drivers changed my life ... FOR WORSE.
VUESCAN actually changed my life.
This little software packed ALL the scanners - all the 20 or 40 THOUSAND models of them - into a single driver that TRAMPLES over windows signed drivers, installs them anyway, and lets you use features that you didn't know you have, but it knows all the 6 models of CCD that the majority of table scanners had, and talks to them directly.
I had a Canon usb-only scanner, no power cable. VUESCAN knew it could scan 2 independent photographs at once. Canon never shipped that feature on my scanner! But the CCD was there!
Whoever did that program was PISSED, and I love him for it, all the 49.95 it cost was WORTH IT. And it ran your stuff on any windows, 10 inclusive.
Man, I wish I had known this years ago. I always hated the built-in "scanning software" OEMs required you use (because of course they never bothered with Windows API compatibility).
I still have that Canon and use it with Linux, which never once stopped working on Windows!
Fascinating. I will have to check this out. Petty and angry programmers sometimes make the best tools 😂
I've mostly been using NAPS2 which has a lot of flexibility but it uses the regular OS drivers.
Vuescan is an absolute _gem_ of a piece of software. I only encountered it as a way to keep an older, perfectly good flatbed scanner (LiDE 30 if you must know) working under Windows long after the manufacturer abandoned drivers for it, but it just... works.
Vuescan is an absolute marvel. Native Mac and Linux versions as well, by the way. I haven't tried it on Linux, but the Mac version also manages to do its thing without any of the driver signing getting in the way.
Fun fact: the Leica Monochrom is a consumer camera with a monochrome CCD sensor. Also, it made me so happy that you mentioned Foveon sensors.
Oh yeah, you know, I should have been more specific! I don't know of any monochrome _camcorders_, but there were monochrome webcams, crappy low-cost digitals, and of course a couple much more recent monochrome "serious" cameras like the Leica and I think one or two others.
@@CathodeRayDudeThere was also the Kodak DCS 760 that mainly used a (CYGM?) CCD APS-H sensor, but they did also make a couple dozen (or hundred, I don't remember) with a monochrome sensor, called the 760M.
I owned a Leica Q2 Monochrom and I f***** loved it!! it was truly unbelievably sharp and it had extremely low noise, even at ISO 50,000 and 100,000.
although I did eventually sell it because it felt irresponsible carrying around a $6000 camera everywhere with me.
I still think about that camera all the time when I'm shooting black and white on other normal digital cameras.
23:00 "Inside your computer, there are two wolves"
God that's so funny on its own I feel like I'm going to cheapen that once I watch through and have the context
One is gray. The other one is gray.
Around 1995, I bought a UMAX 2200 SCSI scanner, supposedly on sale, for $1200. I remember spending hours playing with it, scanning pictures on it, and editing them. Because of its size and not having enough desk space, it found its way to the garage, where it sat for several years until it was sent to Goodwill. Thanks for bringing memories back.
I also bought a Umax which was the most popular brand then and I think I paid $300 in 97 and it was slow but worked. I thought it was revolutionary back then scanning in documents photos but it was slow. Takes a minute to scan a page but a full bed scanner was amazing for under $300 back then. Fun times.
I remember in the 90s scanning my face directly because I didn't want to take a picture, get it developed, then scan the photo
Been their done that. I also remember carefully scanning my butt on an antique scanner
@@danielgerry6374 There it is HAHAHAHAHAHA!
I think we've all photocopied various body parts at one point ;)
Yes, I remember you doing that. We all had a big laugh about it. Oh wait that was me.
@@danielgerry6374Difficult to do if your scanner is a sheet feeding one like this..😊
I saw this video come out earlier today, but I decided to keep it, savor it for a special moment. Because I just finished watching "the debate", and I NEED CRD talking about old scanners for 100 minutes to revive me
1:33:38 missed opportunity to say “but I took a second pass”
There’s at least one “photographic” application for line-scan sensors: they are used to image boxes on conveyor belts, another application where the subject moves consistently in one direction. A major advantage is that they can image the bottom of a box through a narrow gap in the belt.
Some spacecraft use 1D sensors for photography as well. They're often called "push-broom imagers," because they generate the other dimension of the image by being swept across the landscape by some combination of optics and the spacecraft's own motion. The big advantage there (in addition to the cost savings for the sensor itself) is that you don't have to pay upmass costs for, supply power to, or provide temperature control for nearly as many sensor elements.
A 1h40m cathode ray dude video?! We’re in for a real treat ❤
Cathode Ray Dude is the HBomberGuy of tech
I couldn't sleep this afternoon. (I work nights.) This guy and Adrian are lifesavers
@@Milsparrocheck out clabretro for a similar vibe.
Truly amazing how you can fill 100 minutes of content on dinosaur tech. That was the big draw. ☝🏻
was pluggin in an industrial fan as you said "get used to that fan noise" and the sound that came out of my mouth was the metal gear 'alerted' sound
I love seeing words like "Quiet" and "Silent" on old dot matrix printers. In my experience (albeit from ancient childhood memories of the early-mid 90s), "Quiet" meant "you can technically operate this machine without ear plugs and not suffer permanent hearing damage".
You'd have loved working in a 1970s/80s computer room with air conditioning and a few line printers hammering away at full tilt.
Compared to daisy wheel printers, essentially electric typewriter without the keyboard, they were quieter, and some later 24 pin models had a load of foam inside the case that made them much quite than the earlier 9 pin printers.
@@derekday4832Often the line printer had it's own little room with padded walls and door due to this.
@@martinlebl631not just "electric typewriter" high speed one that needed to whack the paper&platten like they personally offended it in order to keep up without greying out.
@@martinlebl631 Or it ran in an airtight padded box and you would open the lid to pick up your printout
The commitment and enthusiasm you show for a topic like this are simply inspiring. Thank you so much, I really enjoyed this one!
10:55 - The fun part of ISA is that until it became standardized as "ISA", _it ran at the CPU speed._ That means an original IBM PC ran it at 4.77 MHz, and the actual throughput was under 1 MB/s; while some early AT/286 clones might run it at 12 MHz. That accounts for the transfer speed differences. It wasn't until clone makers decided to actually standardize it that it settled on a fixed bus speed that accounted for the 8 MB/s transfer speed (on the 16-bit bus at 8.33 MHz.)
Note that IBM never standardized it while it was the primary bus. AT ran it at CPU speed, as did the ISA 8088 and 286 PS/2 models. Only after they abandoned Microchannel in the Pentium era did they adopt the clone-made-standard fixed 8 MHz bus. (And really, by the post-PS/2 era, all PCs were just clones, even when they were from IBM.)
That is a lovely addition of knowledge, thank you.
On some motherboardsyou can overlook the cpu by overlooking the bus, but many cards can't go past 10MHz, but some will go till 16MHz quite happily. Especially useful on low clocked 386s, and V20 and V30 chips that often can't be overlooked otherwise. This often requires switch the crystals, so it was advanced magic even back in the day.
Wouldn't that give 16MB/s?
So that means that the faster ISA PS/2 machines would probably be incompatible with a lot of boards that weren't designed to run faster than 8mhz.
@@kargaroc386 AFAIK that's the case, yes. But it's such a slow frequency that there's a lot of leeway. A card won't suddenly stop working at 4.78MHz, for example.
When I was a kid, in the early 90s, we had an off brand flatbed. I was fascinated with it -- not because it was good, but because it was bad. The proprietary ISA card only recognized the scanner after randomly power cycling for 20 seconds. Among other frustrations. I would stand at the magazine rack while my mom bought groceries and pour over computer magazine reviews trying to answer the question "are all scanners like this?" The articles never gave much information besides specs like DPI. It was maddening. You're doing real fucking work here. Thank you.
Back in the day, all PC compatible scanners were garbage in most respects, unfortunately.
Haven’t made it all the way through but the most interesting thing about scanners is the protocol name. TWAIN = Technology Without an Interesting Name
The clipping he showed literally says it doesn't have a meaning
Technology Without an Interesting Name is most likely a backronym.
@@MaddTheSane I dont think it was. (says me trying to remember journal reports of the time)
This was so good. You're *so* good at working out which bits of a story to tell and which to elide, and presenting quite dry information as an interesting narrative.
In my last year of high school (93), our art department got its first scanner. Color, fortunately. The art teacher wanted to show our class and demo it near the end of a class, and I (being the computer nerd of the class) was allowed to actually test it in front of everyone using graphics software. While I was pretty good with computers, graphics in this kind of context was pretty new to me, and I (from a gamer perspective; and entering into the extreme 90s), set the scan resolution and color depth to the absolute max. This was substantially higher than the resolution of the monitor, it would have taken ten screens to show it all at once.
Ten minutes later it had a one centimetre wide bar processed and visible on the screen as it filled it in from the top down. It probably would have taken a day to finish, assuming it didn't eventually cause an error. And the class ended.
This is actually one of those anxiety based core memories that pops in my head at least once a month. When I did tech for HP scanners and printers, it was omnipresent. I'd actually forgotten it until the first day in training where we handled scanners. Maybe I can retroactively file a workman's comp claim for the trauma and anxiety. :) Fifteen years may be outside the statute of limitations.
This memory is currently both a source of anxiety and also mirth.
This reminded me of the teacher calling on me to read in class in about year 8. Everyone was taking turns to read from whatever book we were studying, but the problem is I'm blind. It was simultaneously painful and hilarious to sit there with my laptop at full volume, reading to the class in classic Stephen Hawking TTS voice.
1:17:11 the technology for autochrome film was patented in 1903 and I'd say that definitely qualifies as colour film, but if you want to be even more pedantic we were taking colour photographs using Trichromes in the mid to late 1800's
Out of curiosity, I dug out my old copy of "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" (5th edition!) and it describes (at about a half page each) the old 4-bit unidirectional port, then two different types of bi-directional 8-bit ports on various PS/2 machines, and only then dives into EPP, ECP and IEEE 1284! It still comes in handy for a lot of esoteric stuff whenever I'm working on something vintage.
No mention of scanners, though. It really doesn't talk about peripherals much.
As a teenager in the 90's I was one of the first people to have a colour scanner and a printer, as well as a copy of JSP paint shop pro. I was amazed at the possibilities. I did a presentation in my school about how I imaged a business where I scanned and re-touched photos for a living. For me, it was truly magical, the possibilities seemed endless.
37:30 You just unlocked a core memory for me. In school in the late 90s, I had a report with lots of images and charts in it, and I had to break the document up into two parts, and edit them on a floppy one part of the document at at time. We weren't allowed to copy files from the disk to the HDD on the shared computers, so the first time I saw all the pages of my final report assembled together at once was when I printed the final copy of it, one half at a time from floppy. I also distinctly remember splitting up MP2 and MP3 files onto multiple floppy sized archives so I can move them from one computer to another, by way of winzip multipart zip files.
The worst experience of this I ever had to deal with was zipping up an AVI file into a multi part archive so I could transfer it to another computer. The 100 MB Zip Drive could hold about 90 MB of data, and I had to make 4 trips across campus to move the pieces one chunk at a time, because I had only 1 zip disk. My goodness those were the dark ages of computing compared to today.
Now some younger folk might be saying "Why couldn't you just buy multiple zip disks?" And sure, you could of, but each disk was like 10 dollars each and usually came in packs of 2 to 3. Accounting for inflation, that's like an extra ~$60 that wasn't needed.
@@Toonrick12 Also, that was the disk provided to me by the school, and we only get 1 disk. Each additional one cost $15 at the time.
@@Toonrick12 Initially they were more like $20ish. Definitely were a hard sell to have multiple. I remember when the product took off and the disk prices sank and I finally had two or three of my own, it was awesome!
Nobody really talks much about the importance of SneakerNet file transfers back then...
@@mwiz100 Was still important in 2016 in my school albeit to trade and bring in cracked copies of games lol
"Theres gonna be a lot of styrophoam noise here. please hold!" i appreciate that warning especialy as a person with autism.
I dislocated my knee today, within minutes of waking up. It's been a long one already. I can't tell you how nice it is to see this notification come up on my phone in contrast. Love love love this. Thank you, Gravis Cathode Ray. Thank you.
FYI, RS-232 serial ports did increase in speed as well. The ones in most 1980s computers maxed out at 9600 bps, but by the early '90s, faster UARTs allowed serial ports to increase to 115,200 bps, fast enough to transfer images from a low-res scanner or digital camera, and even for postage-stamp-quality video from an early webcam or video capture device.
Before USB, consumer grade scanners and early webcams generally used the parallel port, not the serial port. Worked perfectly fine at the time and was often more reliable than early USB stuff.
@@unusualstuff There were indeed early webcams which used a serial port, especially for Macs which never had a parallel port.
The "3 monochrome sensors and a block of prisms" solution is also pretty much how the Technicolor process worked in film starting in 1922.
Came here to say this but you beat me to it
Except that for a while they only used 2 color channels 'cause it was 'good enough' and saved on film.
@@braelinmichelus Yeah, prior to 1922
@@RobertLockhartMakesGames Actually... was 3 film technicolor ever common / the standard? Wasn't it replaced by a newer system rather quickly? But the technicolor name stuck or the company was still involved even after their system fell out of use? I could be wrong, but I think that's what I read the story was.
I'm gonna say something crazy but I actually really like the distortions that this scanner produces. That first scan of the beach and palmtrees was actually quite artistic. There is a whole community trying to emulate the old 35mm look and feel and I think this certainly achieves that. Very informative video for such an overlooked piece of technology.
In the 90's many (cheaper) manufacturers were using the SCSI logo to just mean "peripheral" or "peripheral connection". Many scanners came in SCSI or parallel or proprietary interface variants, so they probably just generalised the plastic moulding.
To add to that, some peripherals used a hybrid connection that used either parallel or SCSI depending on what it was being connected to. The ZipPlus drive from 1996 is the example I have that swaps between the two standards.
@@Toonrick12 That is very true!
Scanners are unsung heroes. My wife had a major medical incident last year and it produced a ton of paper. I went on ebay, grabbed a decade old Fujitsu full duplex ADF scanner for around $60-$70. I had to replace the rollers which was a little more money and a mildly frustrating afternoon, but it was worth it to scan all that paper in a few hours instead of trying to do that with the basic thing on my all-in-one printer.
Some RUclips videos do wonderful things but make your life miserable in the process. Then there are those like the 1 hour 40 minute Cathode Ray Dude essays, which give you all the power with none of the headaches.
The Agfa 1212U was hands down the best scanner for the buck EVER. They sold em for DM 99,- (yes thats ~€ 49), it had USB and the best part: It had a very well written software (at least on OS9 / OSX). Also it was still that sort of scanner that had a lot of great mechanical parts to salvage: Dual linear rails, endstops, a nice 2-phase stepper. And a REALLY nice optical lens assembly (yes they still had those back then). I used to break out the lenses and use them for magnification tasks on my desktop. As a matter of fact, I still daily use the lens from said scanner!
I had a 1212u, it was actually the second scanner we tried, first had weird software issues. At the time I didn't think highly of the AGFA unit, but it was an excellent unit.
It was such a nostalgia hit when he pulled out the 1212. It was probably the first model I ever used.
1:36:43 god bless the psychos who have a drum scanner in their home.
That’s “Home Electron microscope” levels of geek
I remember looking at Macworld product reviews for flatbeds as a lil tyke and drum scanners were always the reference photos that the best scanners only got close. I think it was 1200 dpi for a flatbed vs 4800 on a drum in the mid 90’s
Also thanks for the bit about the different modes parallel cables could operate on. I’d managed to set the item in the bios incorrectly and my flatbed motor would vibrate horribly whenever I scanned anything. Very odd.
And yes, USB changed everything.
See now I’m getting nostalgic for a time when adobe was ‘Hip’ and companies could have semi-viable businesses building plugin libraries like Kai’s Power Tools, and Apple was the permanent underdog
You can drive a fluorescent bulb like an F8T5 easily from a low voltage DC source - in fact this was often done in camping lights in the 80's and 90's. The bulb itself is only 8 watts, so you can drive it with a fairly small DC to AC inverter circuit. They would want to control it from the motherboard to maximise the lifespan of the bulb and avoid blackening the ends, and to control the warm up time.
It would also make it easier for them to just swap the power supply out for different markets (as implied by the sticker on the bottom of the scanner), and likely the power supply is an off-the-shelf component used it many other things at the time.
I think you're on the right track. Not to mention, if an engineer has been tasked with value engineering, there's significant value in using a COTS light tube that you can buy at a hardware store both for manufacturer and owner.
Came to the comments to mention that the choice of light was almost certainly to cut costs and here people with actual knowledge are explaining just how clever the decision was.
Driving using DC/AC converter, the drive frequency can be much higher than 50/60Hz. Driving the lamp using tens to a hundred kHz could be so high that it does not interfere with imaging. Or it can be driven from mcu with a synchronous signal to imaging.
Also the upconverter transformer using high frequencies is much smaller than a ballast. The high voltages are only at the output of the transformer, kept away from other electronics.
Using high frequencies you dont need a typical starter and the lamp does not blink many times when starting up and creating lots of electromagnetic noise, that could crash nearby mcu.
this is unironically what i crave, a bunch of information on the origins of outdated tech that i will never need to use
Go into non-profit arts, especially theater. You will regularly run into cranky behemoth tech old enough to have its own college-age children.
We had that Logitech handheld scanner at high school in early 90s. I remember someone would scan Red Dwarf VHS covers and then recolor them in Paintbrush. Someone eventually stole it from the computer room and it was gone forever.
I currently own something called a Canon LiDe. While not a great one by any standards I'm impressed by the cost optimizations. It consists of a spiral rod down the middle of a plastic box, a glass sheet on top, and a carriage that travels along the rod. The thing is so cheap that it's put together entirely with double sided sticky tape, and the buttons for the front panel are mounted right on the carriage PCB and crawl away from the front panel once the scan is going. Pretty sure it also does the "3-pass" thing by blinking the LEDs as the color it gives off from the fixture does look weird to the naked eye.
Well, that was an hour and forty minutes of my life well spent.
It looked like that array of filters that gentleman had in his hand had cyan magenta and yellow gels in it, and I think that would make sense if what you're scanning is ink in those specific colors.
That one scanner that has two sensors per color is probably a physical version of that two pass scanner that shifts the sensor, they found it easier or cheaper to get double the resolution by putting in two sensors per color and offsetting one a half pixel relative to the other than making a single sensor with twice as many pixels.
The reason why those handheld roller scanners were useful was if you wanted to capture columns of text off of something like a newspaper or a magazine on the desk in front of you. You'd have to really fold a newspaper to fit it into a flatbed scanner, but the little handheld scanner would easily take in a column of text that's only a few inches wide.
Another reason for document fed scanners was legal size documents, almost no flatbed scanners have a 14-in long glass, and if they do, they're spendy. Letter size was usually the limit because that got you not only the majority of printed documents but almost every printed format of photo and magazine, also the vast bulk of books. Basically the only thing you'd miss out on was legal documents and newspapers, as I discussed before with the hand scanners.
Initially I had made like three long comments but I decided to delete them and try to be a little bit more concise. Love all the work you put in.
Hey, thanks for the input! Several people suggested that they might be CMYK filters; I wasn't sure because dichroic filters can look like complementary colors from off-axis. But you have a very good point - virtually all color documents will be using CMYK pigments, that seems natural when you put it that way. Good thinking on the dual sensor stripes bit too, that sounds like a reasonable explanation sans any proof. I tried looking up the specific sensor model but got zero google results, which was weird, since it's a Sony. You'd think that would come up.
1:36:00 "nobody was ready for their strongest potions" I see you Chris, I see you. In a perfect world....
I really enjoyed this entire trip through the history of computer scanners. For most of the past decade or two we take scanners for granted but in the 80s and early 90s it really was tech that took a lot of computing power to accomplish.
I can still remember my first flatbed scanner. It was purchased in the fall of 99. I think it was a sub $200 Epson model. The scanner itself worked fairly well for scanning mostly text documents. However, it was one of the earlier USB scanners and USB support in Windows 98 was oftentimes a real nightmare! Getting it to behave under Windows XP was much easier!
just finished re-watching Tim Hunkin's "Secret Life of Machines" and now CRD uploads even more photocopier history. best day ever
The secret life of machines photocopier episode is magnificent
Just in case you didn't already know, he's actually STILL doing videos on RUclips nearly 40 years later in his delightful characteristic style. The man is a legend.
You can't imagine how important and frustrating scanners have been to me in my 40 year IT career. I worked for a scientific organization during the transition from paper to digital, and all of that legacy paper needed carrying over. I procured everything, slide scanners, document scanners, large format scanners, and interfaces including parallel, SCSI, FireWire, USB, on and on. The last one I purchased was a very large format sheet feed scanner able to scan a full 48 inch quad topo map in about 1.5 seconds. It took my beath way, and cost around $20k, but it looks like it's down to $17k now.
Scanners and Printers are one of the "Old Tech" that just seems to never get better, and just gets crappier as time goes on.
Yep, they nearly all have dreadful descreening at the scanner end that you can’t turn off, detail thrown away before it even gets to the computer. Never tell you that in the sales blurb. Turn the resolution up and the scan ends up the same file size because all the extra captured nuances has been chucked away
@@pauledwards2817the older scanners which still work fine like applefirewire or early usb dont have that….and if you use proper scanning software and not the bundled sotware you can always control every aspect including getting RAW scans i use Scanfast which is free and or paid and is worth every penny
its horrible, I just made a jig where I position a page and then click a photo, its amazing what you can do with a proper set of lenses and a DLR camera.
@@monad_tcp I might be wrong, but one of the "Scan in every public domain physical book" projects started out as just that.
@@spokehedz My understanding is the library of congress still is with a backlog of old books, documents and records spanning to at least the 1800s
On one hand, I know you're right that there isn't, like, a desired "look" for scanners, but on the other hand I know an artist who will sometimes do (or at least used to do) sketches and scan them with a fucked-up scanner that ends up giving the pictures both a lovely purple tint and some oddly beautiful scanning artifacts.
4:39 "Are printers boring? Absolutely! Can you get interested in them anyway if you're a huge nerd? you bet your ass" 😂 My favourite quote of this video
Especially when you get into the weird world of receipt printers. I have one I grabbed from work out of a Ticket Eater (the thing in an arcade that counts and shreds your tickets) that holds the paper internally while it's printing, then kicks it out when you send it the cut command. Had a friend help make a script to use it like a polaroid in VRChat, so that's fun.
I love long videos. This is my version of a documentary or thrilling movie.
As someone who used scanners in the early 90s, and still own a couple "higher end" early 90s scanners - no, "The Grey Scanner for Computer" is *NOT* out of the ordinary for the time. Even the aberrations were perfectly "normal" on low-to-medium end grayscale scanners of the day.
over 👏🏻 one 👏🏻 and 👏🏻 a 👏🏻 half 👏🏻 hours 👏🏻 of 👏🏻 history 👏🏻 about 👏🏻 scanners 👏🏻 lets 👏🏻 go 👏🏻
This was really fun, and I learned a lot. I think I kinda always wondered about this kind of stuff in the back of my head, but never actively though about it.
Also, I really wanna see you and Technology Connections do a video series together.
Also, I'd love to see that 3-sensor camera.
Lastly, I greatly appreciate seeing deep-dive research vids on tech. I appreciate how much work probably went into this, and I'd love to see more every now and then.
As someone old enough to read a newspaper in the 90's. I can confirm, the prints always looked shit. And God forbid you needed to complete anything. Now you get a worse version of a bad print. And half of the page would have some gray or black on it.
You might *think* this is a niche subject.. But to be honest, I'm kinda on the edge of my seat.
Go on, Mr. Cathode Ray Man, I am intrigued!
Superb work!! I remember foaming at the mouth at the prospect of getting my first scanner back in the 90s. Fascinating insight into their history. Happy pride month dude 🌈
Fun fact: SCSI lives on in a contemporary implementation called iSCSI. It's the same protocol run over TCP/IP (aka SCSI over regular networking) instead of dedicated hardware. It is commonly used to host virtual hard disks for virtual machines running on server clusters. If one of the hypervisors (a computer designed to run multiple virtual computers) goes down, another can take on its workload almost immediately since it has access to the same storage as its brother.
SCSI live on SAS
Yes
USB Mass Storage also uses it internally, as does the UAS protocol for USB 3.0+.
For the sake of completeness, guess what Firewire uses internally? Yep, SCSI. Looks like SCSI has proven a handy protocol over many decades.
Also still used for tape drives since [Serial] ATA is too dumb to deal with anything that doesn't work like a hard drive. Even optical drives use SCSI commands internally and tunnel it over SATA (ATAPI).
That sidebar on ultra high end scanners reminds me that I did come across one of those Palantir (not related to the present Palantir company) scanners. It was a big thing that had both a flat bed scanner as well as a sheet feeder. It had three 68030 processors to do the OCR thing, which it could do batch style if you wanted to spend all day scanning in documents and then all night converting the images to text. A neat trick with those was that if you powered up the scanner while holding two of the front panel buttons it would start playing Wagner's Flight of the Valkyries on the stepper motors.
Bro, you do not know how excited I got when I spotted this video. You don't know. I was vibrating. I love this stuff. If I had big money, I'd dump thousands on you to do a deep dive into the history of digitizing tablets.
EDIT: I just got to the part where he said "No one can be interested in scanners..." and just went HA! WRONG! You have no idea of the depths of a dork that I am.
The earliest "desktop scanner" that I could find which even vaguely looked like the modern form factor was the Cognitronics System 70, which you can unearth a couple pictures of online. This was a limited remote OCR optical scanner from 1968 that fed in documents and transmitted scanned data over phone lines to be parsed out by Cognitronics' central computers on the other end, for all kinds of time sharing and operator fees.
The device seems to have evolved over time. A picture I found from 1968 shows something that looks to be a front fed box, but by 1971 you had something more like an ADF. It was just an OCR device that transmitted over fax, but importantly it was a desktop device ("desk-top" in their own words) that scanned documents for the purpose of getting data into a computer, so I say it counts. And devices like it might explain the familiarity with a term like "flatbed scanner" by the early 80s.
I have no interest in scanners but of course I'm going to watch this guy talk about them for an hour and forty minutes.
I used to have a Dest scanner that worked just like this one - it was from 1987! It even came bundled with Windows 2 to run the bespoke application.
I kept waiting for you to pull out a Scanjet and go into a diatribe about how it solved every issue of the era
I really want to get one and I am tempted to try, but I'm afraid it won't survive shipping
@@CathodeRayDude Just ask them to write 'CRT monitor' on the box as given how previously every time you buy one of those expecting it to break it hasn't, perhaps you can keep your streak going.
Yes I was about to write the same 🙈 Felt like all was building up to a gagging reveal haha
@@CathodeRayDude later scanjets had an easter egg of playing "music" when a certain button press / pattern was used.
Although this was a multi-session watch, I actually really like that! Thank you, I love these deep dives!
Back in 1990, all I could afford was a hand scanner. Flatbed scanners were the stuff of dreams.
I got a letter of recommendation from my boss for my next job. It was very flattering, except he spelled my name wrong. I couldn't get ahold of him for a correction, so I undertook to scan it and fix the spelling. If I do say so myself, it worked, and worked well.
Was it Logitech Scan Man ?
@@federicocatelli8785 Probably.
@@Landrew0
Had one in early 90s it was a pain to use...
It truly was. Those handheld scanners were affordable. You could get one for under $100 and it was great for partial scans but stitching a page together was a pain. Flatbed became affordable by 96 you can get Umax for under $300 which was a bargain back then.
My first was a 16 Mono 2.25" wide Hand Scanner, then a 4" 256 color 4" wide Hand Scanner, then a Flatbed legal sized Parallel color, then a FB SCSI, then a FB USB w/film scanner... latest is an Epson Ecotank ET-2840 color scanner/printer/copier that's very handy.
Thanks for the Blast from the Past!
Try goodwill, it's a literal museum of bed scanners (Power supply, cabling, software, documentation and/or functionality not included)
This dude goodwills weekly. He has tons of videos of him doing it too!
Really good stuff at Goodwill. They sell them really cheap basically throwaway. But they don't have stuff from 90s though.
Oh my gods, a ScanPlus! My Dad had one of those back in the day. Slow as molasses and had scan quality about the same. 🤣 Based on the name on the chips, it looks like this was a Plustek product. They're actually still around today, and still in the scanning business. Who knew? Also, I have to know: Where did you get that Capstone shirt?
I also have a Fujitsu scan snap scanner, similar to yours, and it totally changed my document handling. The speed at which it processes the documents is outstanding.
My very first scanner was one of those Logitech hand scanner things, which is utterly useless outside of any artistic endeavour, if you like images that look like they're wonky and melting that is.
For years I put up with an Epson scanner, which works fine but Windows constantly uninstalls the drivers because they are "incompatible" with windows (forcing them to install makes them work just fine). Since as you say nothing has changed in scanners really, Epson clearly have a deal with Microsoft force their customers to purchase the same product again for no reason other than they know there's no reason for them to buy a new scanner otherwise. I hate Epson and refuse to buy anything from them ever again.
Ex ZEoft employee.
PC Paintbrush was shipped as an option with mice, scanners, printers and monitors.
For Windows 95, Microsoft insisted that they were going to buy the source for PC Paintbrush. They modified it slightly, and have been shipping it as Microsoft Paint ever since. I was the person that did the work to get it running with Windows 95.
I am eagerly awaiting your video on that 3-CCD Minolta. that thing is wild.
I had a 286 clone with a “genius” mouse back in 1990 and that MS paint program is a blast from the past.
I've watched this three times already between this version and the original, and I still giggle at the image facing up at 18:05 (even though it was corrected seconds later)
Unintentionally showing off yet another reason the flatbed is a great design, its pretty much impossible to accidentally put the paper in the wrong way
Thanks, I never even noticed :-)
According to Wikipedia, the IEEE 1284 standard parallel port (the enhanced version of the original IBM PC parallel port) which showed up around 1994 is capable of about 2.5 megabytes/second data transfer - fast enough to be reasonable for desktop scanning. In addition to printers and scanners, it was also used for things like zip drives, which addressed the issue of getting your graphic files and desktop publishing documents containing graphics from one computer to another (or to a printing service), when the files were too large for floppies.
Multi-pass scanning didn't entirely go away - It is still used for doing infrared scans for the scratch/dust removal features (Digital ICE/FARE and similar), and also for multi-exposure scans.
Interesting though that the current consumer flatbed scanners seem to have basically barely if at all changed for the like last 10 years now, the current epson and canon models are essentially the same with at most just some minor packaging and software changes - and some of epsons models are the exact same they have been selling for more than 10 years now.
oh, I thought ICE etc had switched to single pass. dang!
And then there was that one windows 7 64 bit update which suddenly rendered most older scanners useless since their software could no longer communicate with their hardware.
Most people didn't know and just assumed their old scanner finally broke and realized the new all-in-one printer-scanners could not match the quality of the old one.
I remember the early days of "handheld scanners". This is already advanced tech. And the quality is about what I would expect from a gray scale scanner from that era.
That Logitec palm scanner came out around 1995. I know because I bought one. It wasn't anything niche, just a cheaper way to make a scanner. It just needed the software it came with and you would scan a document in stripes and 'stitch' the stripes together with the software. I remember I knocked it off the table and cracked the clear plastic widow it scanned through. I contacted Logitec to see if I could buy a replacement window (I freely admitted I broke it) and the cs rep said they didn't know but they'd ask their boss and get back to me so I gave them my info. about a week later just as I was thinking they'd blown me off I got a replacement in the mail in a small bubble mailer without any request to pay for it or anything just a simple note saying they hoped this fixed my scanner.
Quality version control.
My father was constantly in search of a better scanner. first for his art and later for various projects like shirt, mug, plate etc. We started with the handheld grayscale ScanMan and virtually had a new scanner every year or two all through the 90s and 00s. Various bulb technologies, interfaces and resolution jumps were constantly driving new purchases. Rarely did they live up to the marketing and often they were flat out lies. Often the biggest difference between models was the bundled software. I remember the 600DPI color one he bought came complete with full versions of Photoshop and (I believe) Adobe Acrobat, the scanner itself cost less than the Photoshop License so I have no idea how that one worked financially for them.
I’ve been using flatbed scanners since the early nineties in my job in desktop publishing. From the greyscale flatbed that we bought with our first Macintosh, to the high end drum scanner in the noughties and tens. Then back to flatbeds on our all-in-ones when everyone stopped using film cameras.
The patterns that you’re seeing on some of your images could be an interference pattern or clash between the pixels in the image and the halftone dots of the printed “original” being scanned. This pattern is known as “Moire”. It is something that we still have to deal with to this day
I can't say anything for certain because it's been a few years, but I remember my family's canon printer/scanner/copier/fax machine (Canon MX330, I believe) was so absolutely much slower on Color scanning that we would just scan the majority of things in grayscale. Sure, we'd nearly always copy and print in grayscale because it was so much cheaper, but I'm 100% sure we'd _scan_ in grayscale as well just because it was so much faster. This was in the 2010s.
I actually picked up a discarded HP scanner and tested it for the first time, but I realized I was making a color scan and instantly went "oops!" and instinctively reached to cancel the scan, only to be _blown away_ that it did a full color scan _so fast_ I barely had time to reach for my mouse.
I don't know if it's true or not, but I had just taken it for granted that all or at least most color scanners just made three passes like I assumed ours must have to be that slow. But I don't know, maybe I'm somehow totally misremembering and our scanner wasn't that slow in color (I'm pretty sure it was) or maybe I'm totally wrong about _why_ it was so slow. I also seem to remember that color scans tended to show up green around the page instead of white, for some reason.
1:14:45 I looked up the address for HP given here just out of curiosity and it used to be HP's Advanced Products Division. They designed the HP-35 and some other business calculators and apparently pivoted to scanners at some point after the 70s. Interestingly that road no longer exists as it's now Apple Park Way and the building was demolished for the huge new campus.
Back in ‘87 I was working for a laser printer company and a large part of our market was the desktop publishing industry. By the late 80s there were much higher resolution monitors around although they also used dedicated cards to drive them. Yes, scanning was slow and cumbersome and always used the parallel port. A late 80s laser printer was expensive but we sold a lot of them to businesses because of the print quality and speed. They also were not obnoxiously loud in an office environment which is a big deal. A laser printer from the day would produce pretty good quality prints, and in 1988 we started using Canon colour photocopier hardware that could absolutely copy and print full colour photo images at 300+dpi.
A lot of the copier tech was used by laser printer companies - since a laser printer is basically a photocopier with a different controller board. Our printers used Canon copiers from 1985 or so, as did most of the industry. The scanning tech on the colour photocopier was impressive and of course a standard test that we’d show off was to copy our Australian bank notes. There was no way that you’d mistake one for the real thing if printed though because the prints were very glossy and waxy affairs.
I left that company in ‘89 and my next company also had some scanning tech that we sold into the DTP market. Quite expensive, full length cards that occupied two slots on an XT and often dedicated SCSI cards to drive the scanners. Still very slow but the biggest issue was actually the amount of disk storage needed for the images. JPEG had not been invented yet and a common HDD was 20MB, so there really were limitations on what you could do. For reference my home machine in 1990 was a very expensive machine only possible because of where I worked, but was a 20MHz 386DX with two 40MB ST-506 drives with RLL driver cards that improved speed and capacity. For most people a home machine with 80MB of disk space and a laser printer that retailed for circa $5000 was out of reach.
Later in the early 90s I managed to score a massive EIZO monitor at work that required dedicated hardware to drive. I can’t remember the resolution but it would have been around a 20” screen. It was a leftover from the earlier DTP market and the compromise was that I had to surrender it for use any time we were doing a trade show as it was the biggest monitor around.
37:00 absolutely. Getting the images out of the machines was a problem and all of the machines were networked with 10Mb coax Ethernet…
1:33:30 Love the Leeloo Dallas Multipass Easter egg lol
And I’d love to see you look into the history of slide scanners… That’s a whole extra can of worms that you’ll probably like…
No better way to start my day than seeing a new CRD video just dropped
Oh man, this takes me back... I remember that once upon a time in the very early '90s I used to give my drawings to a friend from school who had a fax machine at their parents business, while I had a modem. This is how I scanned my stuff: Over a landline! :D
Soon after I got one of those hand held grey scale scanners and it was a pain in the butt to use it on my 386: Pull that thing too fast it would skip lines and produce images with missing portions, or you'd get wobbly lines and stuff, it was a nightmare.
First flatbed scanner I got was around 1995, a very very cheap thing, but still way more useable than that handheld thing. Funny thing is, that flatbed monster is still supported in sane, so I could use it on my modern Linux machine 30 years later, while the Windows driver stopped working a long time ago, around 2000... ;-)
Top Ten Crazy 1990s Scanners!! (YOU WON'T BELIEVE NUMBER ONE!!!!!)
The mirrors are there to fold the optical path, as that sensor has a very long focal distance, so they need to use mirrors to make the path shorter. The sensor was originally designed for fax and copier machines, where there was room for a long optical path to it, as they were large machines. The long path was to enable the use of cheap spherical optics, as otherwise you would need much more complex lenses, read much much more expensive ones, and they cost a lot more than simple spherical ground and polished lenses, and you need to also use a stack of them glued together to make up the right refractive index variation across the focal plane. Longer lens path and cheap lens is a lot cheaper. The small plate is there to remove light that would otherwise be entering the sensor, because the folded path from the scanner platen does not block all of it completely, so the plate is there to intercept the light.
CFL drive is a simple Royer oscillator system, used to drive millions of tubes in portable lights, and works by having a pair of windings to drive the heaters, and then a much longer winding to generate 100VAC to drive the actual discharge. Not great for tube life, but again, as it only runs for 30 seconds at a time, not too much of an issue, and those tubes would run 1000 hours in use, and then need replacing. A lot of scanner manufacturers used them, though the better manufacturers (Arcus for one) would sell you the right spectrally matched tubes, which were made by Phillips in Eindhoven specially for them, though at a pinch you could use a regular Phillips cool white and get reasonable results.
This is genuinely a thing I look forward to regularly - I'm glad you exist and do things like this, thanks!
Single-chip is actually starting to be adopted in the latest generation of television cameras. CMOS sensors are so high resolution now, and sensitive enough at that resolution, that they can just stick in a very high resolution chip and use a Bayer filter without the artifacting.
I like to think that the thunder scan for Apple II is one of the earliest consumer scanners. It was just an optical detector that you put into your dot-matrix printer and let the printer do the mechanical work of scanning a picture, one dot at a time.
I kind of like the messed up gray scale image, kind of reminds me of something you would find ruffling through a file cabinet in a horror game. The streaking gives it a kind of character
Gotta say, in the early 90s we used a handheld logitech scanman grayscale scanner to insert film photos in our troop's newsletter. It worked surprisingly well for anything the size of a 6x4 print or smaller. Stitching anything larger on the other hand was a nightmare.
I could listen to this man talk about font kernings for four hours.
I would like that group noun to be "human" someday. Great video as always, Gravis