A new scanner arrives, unexpectedly
Posted on August 5, 2006
Filed Under All, Photos, Technology |
A large box arrived for me at work yesterday, unexpectedly. It contained a Mustek A3 USB scanner. Some months ago we were looking at 11×17 inch (A3) scanners. There were a couple in the $1000 price range, a bunch of more expensive ones, and one outlier, the $180 Mustek scanner. I have lots of 11×14 prints in boxes from my days as a press photgrapher.
Checking the opinion boards, it turns out that the Mustek provides surprisng quality for such an inexpensive product, It’s main drawbacks are speed (it’s USB 1.1) and the lack of drivers for Mac OS X. It’s also one of the few products that VueScan, that venerable Swiss army knife of scanner software does not support. I ordered it, figuring I could wire it up to the Windows XP partition on my (normally Linux-running) AMD-64 box, and promptly forgot about it.
It took the vendor months to deliver (back ordered?) so I managed to surprise myself (which I suspect will get a lot more common the older I get). Spouse Linda was hosting a luncheon for bride-to-be Anne Peterson, so I spent a little time fussing with the Mustek.
Looking at the AMD box, I realized it’s been so long since I’ve booted it into Windows, that somehow the Windows XP partition had disappeared. Oops. Got SuSE and Fedora Core, but no Windows. Then I considered putting Windows on our Intel Mac Mini via Boot Camp, but realized that there was some risk of the elderly Mustek Windows scanner driver balking on the Mac’s latest generation hardware. So no Windows running anywhere, and no OS X driver for the scanner. Hmmm.
Mustek’s web site doesn’t mention it, but the box says ‘Supports Mac OS 8 and 9.’ I wondered if my old and long-running G4 Cube might still have a Mac OS 9 ‘Classic’ partition. After a little archeology, it turned out it did, and the Mustek Mac installer, while a bit peculiar got the job done. Along the way I was greatly amused by the rather dated feel of Mac OS 9. The Mustek plug-in, for a product called Color-It, is downright quaint: it forgets all your settings between scans, and it and the scanner are not fast.
However, I did manage to scan about 12 prints in the space of an hour, from one of many boxes in the garage. And the quality is actually decent - the scanner is 300×600 dpi native, which works fine with the large prints, and I don’t think the prints have much more dynamic range than the scanner. The scan at the top of this post is from an 11×14 print made from a 4×5-inch negative, taken in East Los Angeles in the 70s. So we can now slowly add to the Photo Archive…
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There’s a story behind this picture. It appeared on the L.A. Herald Examiner’s fashion page, complete with all the accessories and flourishes of cholo fashion - the chinos, with the seams split an inch from the cuff, the just-so shoes et al.
The editors received a huge response in the mail: mostly negative. The Herald Examiner’s traditional readership had been Republican and conservative, and in Los Angeles, any celebration of poor Hispanics was not well received.
The picture ran on a Thursday as I recall. A LAPD beat cop called me Sunday morning at the paper (a new hire, I worked evenings and weekends and had Tuesday and Thursday off). He said one of our drivers had been beaten up the night before, and one of the kids in the photo was a suspect. Could I give him a print, so he could take it to the hospital for a positive identification? I did. It was, of course, a con, and I, a rookie, fell for it. No HerEx driver had been assaulted. God knows what the cops used the print for.
That was the begining for me of learning about what police forces, especially big, urban police forces, are all about.
[…] On the one hand I had to drag lights around and deal with publicists: on the other hand I got to shoot the annual swim suit illustrations. Another 11×14 print scanned on the new Mustek A3. Every dog, and photog, has his day… […]