Last year, I chose two Free Software products to make a Christmas donation to. I had fully intended to do the same this year, indeed to make it an annual event. It would be fantastic if others took some time to thank their favourite Free Software projects of the year. Anyway, it slipped my mind over the Christmas and New Year period because of the building work we were having done at home.
I’ve caught up now and I’ve made two donations: One to Gallery, which powers the gallery on this site and several other galleries I run for my friends. It’s a great project, although I still prefer the older 1.5/1.6 series than version 2. I use our gallery so often that I almost take the software for granted. I thought it was probably time to put that right. 
The second project I chose was WordPress. WordPress powers this site and it’s powerful, flexible and generally very good to use.
These two projects are pretty mainstream compared with last year’s choices. I hope 2007 will bring a cool new piece of esoteric software to wow me, so I can plug it on this site.
This one’s for the search engines…
I have purchased an MSI K9N SLI Platinum motherboard. I also purchased a Noctua NH-U12F heatsink from Quietpc.com for use with the motherboard. The motherboard has an AM2 socket and the heatsink claims compatibility with AM2 sockets. However, these two items aren’t compatible. There are a series of resistors on the rear of the motherboard, underneath the CPU socket. Most of these fall into the square cut in the rear mounting plate of the heatsink. Two do not, so the rear plate rocks back and forth on the resistors. I didn’t try attaching the heatsink but the whole weight of the heatsink would have been pressing on the resistors and they would almost certainly have cracked and come away from the motherboard.
Interestingly, the stock heatsink rear mounting plate supplied with the board has an extra half cutout section to accommodate the problematic resistors. The squares in the centre of the back plates are exactly the same size though. I’m not familiar with the specification for AM2 sockets, so I don’t know if MSI have broken the specification by placing the resistors outside the square or whether it’s sloppy design from Noctua.
Either way, I’ve had to send the heatsink back and I’d welcome any comments recommending quiet heatsink models that are tried and tested with the above motherboard.
Hopefully the posts over the last week about negative scanning have been useful for some of you. It’s been interesting testing the various services offered and I’m grateful that the companies all offered free trials. This means that you can try the services yourselves and see if you get any different results! Please leave a comment if you do, or if you discover other companies you can recommend.
My personal conclusion is that none of the services were quite what I wanted. I don’t think it’s just me being pretentious about what I want. Although none of the results were bad, I either wasn’t really happy with the image quality or wasn’t happy with the price. Perhaps the services are designed for those wanting to get their images in and up on the web. For most of my photos that would be the case, but I also want to have a digital backup of my images that I can easily duplicate and store elsewhere.
So I’m not sure what I’m going to do. There’s no point in paying potentially a lot of money for a service that doesn’t quite achieve what I want. If it wasn’t for the colour cast in the Slidescan4u.co.uk images I would be tempted to have them scan the negatives and manually touch up the ones I want to reproduce. I may try them again and see if the problem occurs on some other negatives. The other option is to scan them all in myself, which would take a few days solid work. Still, there’s no hurry…
I printed off the free trial scan form from the Pix Studio website and posted them the form with accompanying negatives. I didn’t hear anything until nearly four weeks later, when the sample images were returned by Royal Mail using the “Signed for” service. (Admittedly this was over the Christmas and New Year period, which should be taken into account.) In the cardboard-backed envelope were my negatives, a stock letter thanking me for using their trial service and a nicely labeled CD with the images.
The images themselves were three scans of the first negative at their three different services – Silver, Gold and Pro. The JPEG images were 1400×920 (1000dpi), 2800×1840 (2000dpi) and 5600×3680 (4000dpi), weighing in at 1.9MB, 7.8MB and 31.5MB respectively. This is the largest file size of any of the three companies and implies very low compression used when saving the JPEG. The aspect ratio of the images was 1:1.5. The service I trialled included border removal (i.e. cropping the black bits from the edge of the scan) and dirt/scratch removal.
The scratch removal worked pretty well, certainly when compared with the untouched scan (from slidescan4u.co.uk), but didn’t remove the larger scratches which can still be seen on the images. (Pix Studio charge £25 per frame for retouching including “major” scratches. Whether the scratches on my negative constitute “major” is up for debate, I think.) The scratches can be seen quite clearly on the larger resolution images and would spoil any large reprints.
Of all the scans, these ones were closest to the original colour of the print, although they are a bit darker. The post-processing has removed some detail, but not too much. The main problem with the scans is the cost per frame. For the largest sizes, it’s £2 + £1 for border and scratch removal. Even the smaller sizes are relatively expensive in comparison with the other companies.
I posted the images first class to slidescan4u.co.uk and didn’t hear anything further for a week. Then I received the sample images attached to a personalised e-mail explaining:
Due to scratches and the initial quality of your negatives you may find that the digital images sent to you as samples may not be to the standard you were expecting. The delay in sending you this email along with your samples has only been the result of trying different settings with our scanners in order to improve the quality of the image.
So, as I expected, there’s no scratch removal, automated or otherwise, on their service. That’s fair – they don’t claim they do it and at 27p per scan it’s not surprising. It seems as if they’ve tried quite hard to get a good quality scan but scratches and dirt are still very visible. A fair proportion of my negatives are probably in a similar condition and one of the reasons for paying someone else to scan in the slides is so that I don’t have to spend ages processing them myself.
The scans themselves are about 3700px by 2500px, resulting in JPEG files between 1.4MB and 1.7MB each. Their website has been updated: Previously it said that all scans were at 4800dpi, now it’s only that “where appropriate”. The 3200dpi scans from DB Images were about the same number of pixels and about 20MB in size. So the images from slidescan4u.co.uk must have had a lot more compression applied.
Despite the higher compression, the detail in the scan is much better than at the equivalent resolution from DB Images, with considerably less graining. Overall the tone of the photos is closer to the original prints than the DB Images scans. There is a clear pink tint to the scan though, which is not present in the other scans and the images are marred by the scratches. I was able to remove the pink colour cast with the automatic level feature in The GIMP, but I’d rather not have to do that with all the photos. I suppose I could script it which would help. I’m also not sure why there was a colour cast on their scans in the first place. I didn’t get one when I scanned the negatives myself.
See all the sample scans here. I asked for the negatives to be returned, which they were within a few days. The ratio of the images was 1:1.45, which is fine. Overall the scans showed the highest detail of the three companies, despite the high compression of the JPEG images. This was probably due to the lack of post-processing, which seems to have removed the detail from the other companies’ efforts. Because of the colour cast, as well as the lack of dirt and scratch removal, I’m not sure this service is quite right for me. However, if you have nice clean negatives which you would like scanned at a high resolution and at a cheap price you might want to check out DB Images. As long as you are happy to make cosmetic adjustments to the images yourself.
I posted the negatives to DB Images first class. Two days later I received an e-mail telling me they’d arrived, been scanned at different resolutions and would be returned in the post straightaway. Delivered the following day was a labeled, personalised CD in a slim-line jewel case along with the negatives and a covering letter. The CD was a little scratched on the rear though.
Each of the four negatives had been scanned at three resolutions: 1200dpi (1600×1000px), 2400dpi (3300×2000px) and 3200dpi (4400×2700px), resulting in file sizes of 2.8MB, 10.9MB and 20.3MB respectively in JPEG format. These are pretty respectable file sizes for JPEG images that haven’t been over-compressed. Dirt and scratch removal was pretty good, although the retouching on some of the larger lines on one of the frames was perhaps not quite a smooth as it could be. There was noticeable graining on the images which was worse at higher resolutions.
The images were the most heavily cropped, the returned scans being almost 1:1.65 in ratio rather than the more usual 1:1.4 or 1:1.5. Cropping can improve the composition of a photo, but it’s one thing I’d prefer to do myself.
Overall it was a highly efficient service and very fast. The images were the most vibrant of the three companies’ efforts, although the automated colour adjustment meant the scans didn’t match the original prints very well. The graining was also a problem as it lost of lot of detail which can’t be regained without rescanning. I’d recommend this service for people who want get digital versions of images for low-resolution web use without having to manipulate the images themselves. You can also check out the gallery of sample images.
A while ago I posted about bulk negative scanning services. I decided to take up the free test scan offers of three companies: DB Images, Slidescan4u.co.uk and PixStudio. There are some slight differences in the test scan services offered by the companies. DB Images and Slidescan offer to complete a negative strip of 3 or 4 frames, whilst PixStudio scan a single frame at each of their offered service levels. (The main difference between the PixStudio services is the resolution at which the negative is scanned).
The Slidescan service includes up to 4800dpi scans but no mention is made of any colour correction or scratch removal included in the price. Given that the price is so cheap at 27p per frame, this is perhaps understandable. The DB Images service does include colour correction and dust and scratch removal. Their prices range from 25p to 96p depending on resolution (1200dpi to 3200dpi). The PixStudio service doesn’t include any retouching as standard, and is quite expensive at 95p for a 1000dpi scan up to £2 for a 4000dpi scan. Dust and scratch removal and border removal adds £1 to the price per frame. Retouching (red eye removal, colour correction, major scratch removal etc.) is priced at £25 per frame. PixStudio do offer a bulk discount and this is calculated by their rather neat online quotation tool. Their bulk discount seems to be about 12% for orders of the magnitude I’m considering – over 1200 frames. They are still the more expensive service however.
PixStudio have a form that needs to be completed, printed off and included with the negatives when posted. I wanted to double-check the postal details of Slidescan and DB Images, so e-mailed them directly. Within two hours I had a personal reply from both companies giving the necessary details. Both companies also said that they could scan in 126 format negatives. (PixStudio “only” seem to do 35mm, medium format and 4″x5″ negatives.)
I selected a strip of negatives from my stock. I chose one that had different types of shot in it, but ones that I wouldn’t be heartbroken about should they go AWOL in the post or get damaged by one of the companies. One shot was a close up of a flower, another a wide-angle shot of the London Eye and City Hall. I scanned all four frames in using my existing negative scanner as “backup” and spent some time doing some colour adjustment and simple dust and scratch removal on the pictures.
I’ll post about each of the companies I tried over the next few days.
