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
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.
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.
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.
....... 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
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.
What a fascinating read! I've been very curious about archival-grade scanning (imaging) for a while, but finding information about it online is extremely difficult. This comment gives me a lot of narrow search terms to try later.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@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
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.
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.
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.
Some TH-cam 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.
My favorite anecdote about scanners (scanecdote?) is from when I was working at MCI Worldcom as an HP Pavilion support tech. HP made a deal with Walmart to carry a package of HP's low end devices to bundle with their lowest end Pavilion (which was basically a rebadged budget Compaq). The printer was a Deskjet 722C and the scanner was a budget ScanJet. The parallel passthrough (cables were purchased extra, so people bought 2 to daisy chain them) wasn't compatible with the 722C. That printer was a garbage host-based bargain basement model. It was an ink-eating machine and you got awful prints out of the deal on anything but the super expensive photo paper. And it needed every data channel from the host machine to run because it just had simple stepper motor controllers on board. Everything else was done in software on the host computer and it utterly came to a crawl when you printed anything. To save money, the scanner team did the bare minimum and only passed through pins that were required for PCL. So HP bundled incompatible hardware for the least computer literate demographic ... it was a support nightmare.
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 Holy Spirit Can give you peace guidance and purpose and the Lord will 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
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!
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.
I spent a major chunk of my professional career creating technical videos. I scripted, stared, and produced about twenty. I imagined being as smooth and well spoken as you, but you are the “real deal”. The man who literally makes all content compelling and interesting to watch. You could probably make watching dog poop drying in the sun interesting. My compliments sir!
I was a press operator and the transferred to digital desktop publishing in the late '80s. One huge gripe I still carry is the confusion between DPI (dots/inch) and PPI (pixels per inch). DPI is only used for measuring halftone screen pitch, also called LPI. PPI has nothing to do with that, although there are optimal ratios. For example, if you were planning to use a 60 DPI halftone screen, you would want about 300 PPI.
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.
Love how much detail you go into on past technology! I'm the same age as you and fascinated by the beginnings of tech in every form! Life time subscriber here !
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!
That is built like a fax machine of the era.... I used to work on them back in the day. Including the exposure correction hump thing in front of the senor at 54:48 it is there to correct the light balance from the centre to the edge of the scan otherwise the edges would be dark on the scan...
@@bobbylox 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.
The little piece of metal sticking up in the path of the light before it hits the lens is to compensate for differing brightness across the slice of image which is brighter towards the middle, due to the shorter optical path at the centre, vs the ends. If you remove it, you'll find that the scans will be over bright / washed out around the centre of your scan. 1:10:47 The scanner on the left of that image is in fact a Canon ADF scanner (Originally named the Canoscan), which is basically a stripped down fax machine with a PC interface instead of a modem & printer mech. You could indeed put a multipage document in it, just as you would in a fax machine. 1:23:11 The black pass in the colour scanner is to calibrate black levels in the image sensor, so the CPU do noise (electrical noise, nothing to do with sound) compensation.
Just in case you didn't already know, he's actually STILL doing videos on TH-cam nearly 40 years later in his delightful characteristic style. The man is a legend.
I remember my Dad (RIP) buying so many scanners because he wanted to scan photos (he was a photographer) that he took and then print them out to see if that was another way of editing photos and printing them out on photo paper. From parallel to usb…various DPI ranges.
Part of me is thinking "Seattle is such a cool place for carspotting, where did you see a late 1st gen Toyota Century" and part of me is thinking "Why have I dedicated so many brain cells to cars that I saw a late 1st gen Toyota Century and got so derailed I had to leave a comment"
oh this place is unreal for cars. that thing was parked on rainier ave for like 2 months and then disappeared again, I can't believe I managed to catch it at the same time that I got my ancient DSLR working.
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.
Having now listened to the whole thing I have to really admire this. It's got that thing like how a science teacher tells you every year that what you learnt the year before was just the basic version and that you need to learn how it really works, with a brand new twist in the tail every 15 minutes
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.
TH-cam did it's job bringing me here. I'm an avid Technology Connections watcher. This channel has a similar vibe but a different flavor and I am all for having more tech content to binge. I hope my comment helps push your channel to even more people!
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).
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.
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.
I think a lot of scanner tech can be probably tracked to IBM to mid 60s, where they had various optical reading devices. And maybe Xerox too. Some IBM models from late 60s supported automated document feeding, sheets, rolls, forms, but also hand writing recognition (some were simpler and only supported special fonts or mark sheets), but all in essence were digital device with scanning and in principle could produce bitmaps of scanned documents. There was simply no use of so big bitmaps on early computers, and storage would be too big. Customers wanted not bitmaps, but actual data on these pages, so black-and-white and digitizing text was what they needed. As these were all expensive, and for business use, they all were essentially with automated documented feed, and document moving on rollers under the scanning elements. Example would be something like IBM 1288 from 1968. And that is advanced model already. Many earlier models, used various tricks, and only really supported reading and recognizing text, not because they didn't know how to read a bitmap, but more because they didn't know how to write algorithm to process the image into a text, so they used some other methods. At the end of a day, businesses wanted to read some stuff written to them (banks checking checks, forms, census reports, tax forms, etc), and get that into a computer. And this is also why you will not find many advertisements for these things, they were not a consumer product, or associated with image / photo processing (I would not be surprised tho if some similar were used by military to analyze satellite photos for example, etc). And for massive amount of document input, flatbed would be inferior. Flatbed only makes sense when imputing very few documents, or document cannot be rolled / curved, like small photos, single slide negatives, books. Flatbed were more costly because you needed 1) precision rods, 2) align entire travel, so optics is in focus, 3) move possibly heavy assembly, 4) with early tech utilize mirrors and complex optics, because sensing element was too heavy and too complex to move along. 5) add a glass and case. While roller design, well just some rollers, a stepper motor, and single axis alignment needed, no precision rods or bearings; and similar to other tech like printers, typewriters, etc, CCD sensors definitively started mono-chrome. They used multiple sensors and color splitter to achieve color. Similar to DLP projectors. Mono-chrome CCD sensors are still used to this day in astronomy and industrial sensing, and barcode scanners, due to their better efficiency, lower noise, and higher resolution. There is no such things as color CCD sensor really. You can put some filters in front of each pixel, and that is what color CCD often means, but that is more expensive. There are sensors that can detect all 3 visible primary colors using a single sensor with no Bayer filter. It is called Foveon X3, now part of Sigma. They are really neat, and it is possible to get cameras with them (albait older models with older sensors; the new sensor is in development for many years, and might see production in 2025). Still 3 separate CCDs will be better at very low light conditions, but Foveon X3 should be cheaper, simpler, and all color channels inherently aligned. EDIT: I should have watched to the end. I see you mentioned some of these things. I am also sure multi-pass scanning is still a thing in some markets, like negative and film. Including IR pass to detect dust and scratches, and visible light pass at different gains to get way more dynamic range. Also check patent US3011020A from 1959 (Original Filed March 30, 1954) for example. And references / citations there.
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.
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.
1:29:12 The main issue with Bayer filters in not just that they sample distinct points and and merge that, that is just space division multiplexing and we do that in reverse with most display technologies (except 3 chip projectors which use the prisms, 3 tube CRT projectors which just use alignment and single chip DPL projectors which do time division multiplexing with a color wheel just like the multipass and color flickering scanners). The issue is that the resolution of the color image sensor (in number of pixels) is given by the resolution of the monocrome sensor (in number of monochrome photosites) behind the Bayer pattern filter. And of those pixels a half are green, a quarter are blue and a quarter are red. This means that an algorithm is needed to look at nearby pixels to determine the actual color of a pixel and this means that just like with YUV or YPbCR video where often the chroma resolution is far less then (a quarter of?) the luma resolution, the same issue applies to Bayer filter sensors at a hardware level. There is at least one alternative to the Bayer grid or using prism to split the image for cameras called the Foveon X3 sensor by Sigma and it works by having each light frequency penetrate to different depths into the chip so the photosites for each color are behind each other. Edit: and you just mentioned Foveon. Also now with incredibly high pixel count sensors we can use pixel binning but I am not sure how smart each pixel binning approach is. With very high resolution sensors we can actually dedicate 4 photosites (or more) behind different color filters to a single pixel. I am not sure if any of the pixel binning algorithms take advantage of this or if they still apply the bayer pattern correction algorithm and then an algorithm to combine full color pixels together into one pixel. Capturing RAW of course means you get a choice on what algorithms are applied and how. But pixel binning in the end means sacrificing light sensitivity for better accuracy, in other (incorrect) words, sacrificing luma for chroma. So over all just 3 practical ways to do electronic (and maybe not only electronic) color imaging: physically splitting and joining color channels, space division multiplexing and time division multiplexing.
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.
1:00:31 Bonus points for mentioning the Lena picture. We used that picture in a class on image processing while doing my computer engineering major. And that was in 2010. Yes, that picture was used for DECADES.
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.
Has to be my favorite video of yours thus far. I was glued for the whole time. The amount of research, both relevant and quite complete. This video answered most of my own questions in a pretty definitive and conclusive manner. Wow, thank you. 1h40 passed so quickly. This is documentary level. Congratulations.
In 1985 to 1990 your assuming somethings : 1. That the person scanning the file would be manipulating it entirely in RAM at full resolution. A lot of software at the time let you assemble files with images without actually rendering the document with the image visible, they just showed the outline of it. 2. Odds were good that software existed to scan to harddrive without displaying all of it at once or without displaying it at full color. I had coworkers who were laying out posters for technical conferences and they were often stuck using page swapping to see parts of a graphic or parts of a poster at a time. The displays also often only worked on grey scale when the images were color in the final print. Both methods persisted well into the mid 90s.
You're absolutely right, and in fact PC Paintbrush *is* working from the HDD, but Picture Publisher isn't; it expects to load the entire thing into RAM and errors out if it's too big. I'm not saying that it was impossible, more that... the likelihood of running into problems was high, especially in the form of "already spent $250 on this picture editor only to find out it can't work that way; now have a $600 scanner and a useless editing package."
@@CathodeRayDude Ah but in those days you didn't just buy the stuff and then find out how it worked. Not for the amount of money it all cost. You looked at reviews, you asked vendors, you got product demos on VHS tape or laserdisc, and you went to tradeshows to see things run. In 1985 - 1990 these weren't things you were doing at home so you were I am assuming someone working at least in an office who could do all this. Once more we used to have in person computer shops which did demos. I remember like 5 of them around rt 128/Cambridge here in Massachusetts. Yes I know I was in a privileged place for this for that time but if you were spending this much money in 1985, you would make the drive.
@@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.
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
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.
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 🌈
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.
Half-tone is still used in most of modern printing, including laser toner printing, since it's just easier to have a high resolution than to print shades of a color. Your assumption about half-tone being better for compression is likely spot-on though, since the CCITT Group 4 compression (used in TIFFs and faxes since 1989) deals really well with aligned columns of black or white pixels.
71-yr-old here. The 7400 series TTL logic goes way back for me as I worked on the military 5400 version in 1974 and the first hobbyist 7400 for tinkering. My film darkroom photography goes back to 1968. I waited to get a computer until 1999 so that the memory and resolution was high enough to scan my film and slide images. My first scanner was a holder fed HP S-20. It did fine for 35mm but I had to wait until I went past the Minolta Dimage IV scanner with the 16-bit to my 2008 Epson scanner that does 6x7 cm (120) roll film media. The old photo enlarger and wet processing stuff packed away and the scanner and the old win 7 computer remains. The Epson has a broader density depth for those dark slide astrophotos as to not saturate the bright star images on the negatives as well. Done in 16 bit depth, these images are suited for the latest astrophoto image processing software to bring out the details the old wet darkroom ever achieved.
Stay in good health and keep up on your doctor visits. Moms in the hospital at 71, she just had her birthday. And many people seem to be konking out. Were you Navy or Army?
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.
I remember watching those computer chronicle and reading those PCWorld / Pc Mag, as Staples first opened in the province of Quebec in ~1989, the Logitech Scanman were selling hot off the shelf.. and the price of a monochrome flat bed scanner was like 6x, by 1991 the Scanman we’re being liquidated at $99, bought one and returned it immediately and decided to save for a flatbed that was by then 3x for monochrome and the Scan-jet I honestly don’t recall but going to say about $700.
An almost two hour video about scanners and the nuances of the tech that underpinned them in 90’s? Fuck yeah, let me get a stiff drink and just sit back and enjoy while clinging to the edge of my seat. This is the type of content that pushed me to throwing in on Patreon. Keep doing what you’re doing CRD.
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
30 years ago a company put 3 million dollars into developing that port adapter and we’ve come so far in the future that we can just eyeball the fact that this device “Doesn’t do shit” 😂 I love it
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 miss my slim and sexy CanoScan LIDE scanner. It was slow over LPT and always sounded like it was destroying itself while scanning, but I still loved that thing.
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.
Oh man that AGFA SnapScan image is bringing back _memories._ If my family didn't have that exact unit, they had one mighty similar. We _also_ had one of those Logitech palm scanners, although I never used that one much myself.
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 can't decide if you make really boring things interesting, I'm a huge nerd that finds scanners interesting, or both, but I can marathon your videos for hours man.
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 remember early 90s dad bought his second pc a pentium full tower from Escom with SCSI scanner. The card plus io card and sound etc was a logistical nightmare getting irq and DNA jumpers setup I spent hours as a kid figuring it out. That scanner was dog slow and made so much noise We had an HP desk jet 500c which cost £550. Dad later added an office jet black and white but scanner printer and fax machine in one. When he started his own business he bought an Epson A3+ printer ink jet and it cost well over £1000 at the time it was a real beast. Remember saving up £40 for a soundblaster just so I could hear the guys get run over and squashed in dune 2.
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.
A thing to note is that HAL first really became a thing with Windows NT, drivers for Windows 1, 2, and 3 were mostly janky things ontop of DOS called VxDs. Windows 98 introduced the WDM abstraction layer for drivers, which NT later adopted ontop of its HAL. Hence you'd find things like joysticks, scanners, printers, etc. working on Windows 2 but break on Windows 3, etc. Not to mention janky software support in many cases, where drivers sometimes shipped with modules for specific apps to actually make their product work.
It's fair that VxDs were "thinner" than what's used by the actual, literal HAL, but the point I was getting at is that even by Windows 1.0, apps were expected to talk to most hardware through the OS (and could cause total chaos if they didn't), and by Windows/386 this was fairly well enforced - the whole point of protected mode being that apps can't just touch memory or I/O without permission after all. So yeah, not every aspect of the early Windows driver system was robust by any means, but DOS on the other hand was a total wild west that didn't even attempt to provide a framework for common hardware interfaces beyond... the mouse, I think? For graphics specifically, I believe there was never any BIOS or DOS assistance in smoothing over the differences between cards other than shortcuts to set modes on the basic IBM CGA/EGA/etc. Certainly nothing as luxurious as Windows' device independent bitmaps, or the paradise that would be the VESA extensions - imagine the ramifications if _those_ had existed ten years earlier. All the same, I was probably overzealous in how I put it.
My dad used to work installing those $90000 ImagiTex scanners mentioned at 1:10:18 . They were part of DuPonts fully digital printing systems. The scanner itself was a huge flatbed scanner the size of a small car, and it hooked up with a proprietary interface to a 386 QNX workstation with a something like a 1000 x 1000 grayscale monitor and a digitizer tablet.
You made printers interesting enough to listen to you talk about while sewing/crocheting, so great job! I love when people do research in depth like this. I am the type of person to ask 'what was the advent of/first _' questions, so you satisfy that need I have for information to be consolidated. I usually check channels like yours for such questions I have related to tech🤓
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.
There are scaners going all the way back to 1920s. There is a video here on youtube will a full workflow where someone takes a picture, devlop it, scans it to a drum. Radio in to a phone network (yea, that how it worked prior to mobile phones). Then transfer the photo via the phone line and then edge it to a plate for printing. From photo to print in half a hour.
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
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.
Very cool, the video just got weirder and weirder - to see you surrounded by a mountain of enormous videocams like King Of The TrashCams was hilarious! In a previous life I was a printer, like the job not the device, and yep we did have a whole floor dedicated to image processing and plate making with drum scanners having an entire room to themselves.
Wow, now I know more about scanners than I ever thought I would. Despite scanner hardware seemingly being basically finished from the start, the multiple mentions of early scanner software makes it sound miserable at times. Industrial equipment is always a terrifying wall due to so much bespoke hardware as well as just general availability. Great video!
That Agfa SnapScan 1212P was actually an amazing scanner, with the right software. At that time, it was all I could afford for my DTP hobby. I had the parallel port version, which felt like the cheap version compared to a SCSI scanner. What I discovered was that Agfa had professional grade software called Fotolook 3.5 for their big, professional flatbed scanners costing thousands of dollars that also worked with that humble little 1212P, at least in Windows NT 4.1. The scans it produced with that software rivaled the pro Agfas they had at the plate makers. Those guys looked at my scans on their professional, calibrated monitors and couldn't tell the difference in scans when made at the same resolution. The secret was in the color profiles that FotoLook used plus the fact that it could access the raw data from the scan sensor. I still have some of the images I scanned on that scanner and they still have an amazing color quality to them, similar to Agfa film.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
"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
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.
What a fascinating read! I've been very curious about archival-grade scanning (imaging) for a while, but finding information about it online is extremely difficult. This comment gives me a lot of narrow search terms to try later.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Thanks! When I see there's a new CRD video on YT, I know it's going to be a good day.
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.
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! 👍
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.
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. ☝🏻
The commitment and enthusiasm you show for a topic like this are simply inspiring. Thank you so much, I really enjoyed this one!
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.
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.
Some TH-cam 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.
My favorite anecdote about scanners (scanecdote?) is from when I was working at MCI Worldcom as an HP Pavilion support tech. HP made a deal with Walmart to carry a package of HP's low end devices to bundle with their lowest end Pavilion (which was basically a rebadged budget Compaq). The printer was a Deskjet 722C and the scanner was a budget ScanJet. The parallel passthrough (cables were purchased extra, so people bought 2 to daisy chain them) wasn't compatible with the 722C. That printer was a garbage host-based bargain basement model. It was an ink-eating machine and you got awful prints out of the deal on anything but the super expensive photo paper. And it needed every data channel from the host machine to run because it just had simple stepper motor controllers on board. Everything else was done in software on the host computer and it utterly came to a crawl when you printed anything. To save money, the scanner team did the bare minimum and only passed through pins that were required for PCL. So HP bundled incompatible hardware for the least computer literate demographic ... it was a support nightmare.
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
Holy Spirit Can give you peace guidance and purpose and the Lord will
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
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
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.
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 spent a major chunk of my professional career creating technical videos. I scripted, stared, and produced about twenty. I imagined being as smooth and well spoken as you, but you are the “real deal”. The man who literally makes all content compelling and interesting to watch. You could probably make watching dog poop drying in the sun interesting. My compliments sir!
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)
I was a press operator and the transferred to digital desktop publishing in the late '80s. One huge gripe I still carry is the confusion between DPI (dots/inch) and PPI (pixels per inch). DPI is only used for measuring halftone screen pitch, also called LPI. PPI has nothing to do with that, although there are optimal ratios. For example, if you were planning to use a 60 DPI halftone screen, you would want about 300 PPI.
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.
Love how much detail you go into on past technology!
I'm the same age as you and fascinated by the beginnings of tech in every form!
Life time subscriber here !
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!
That is built like a fax machine of the era.... I used to work on them back in the day. Including the exposure correction hump thing in front of the senor at 54:48 it is there to correct the light balance from the centre to the edge of the scan otherwise the edges would be dark on the scan...
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
@@bobbylox 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.
The little piece of metal sticking up in the path of the light before it hits the lens is to compensate for differing brightness across the slice of image which is brighter towards the middle, due to the shorter optical path at the centre, vs the ends. If you remove it, you'll find that the scans will be over bright / washed out around the centre of your scan.
1:10:47 The scanner on the left of that image is in fact a Canon ADF scanner (Originally named the Canoscan), which is basically a stripped down fax machine with a PC interface instead of a modem & printer mech. You could indeed put a multipage document in it, just as you would in a fax machine.
1:23:11 The black pass in the colour scanner is to calibrate black levels in the image sensor, so the CPU do noise (electrical noise, nothing to do with sound) compensation.
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 TH-cam nearly 40 years later in his delightful characteristic style. The man is a legend.
I remember my Dad (RIP) buying so many scanners because he wanted to scan photos (he was a photographer) that he took and then print them out to see if that was another way of editing photos and printing them out on photo paper. From parallel to usb…various DPI ranges.
1:33:38 missed opportunity to say “but I took a second pass”
Part of me is thinking "Seattle is such a cool place for carspotting, where did you see a late 1st gen Toyota Century" and part of me is thinking "Why have I dedicated so many brain cells to cars that I saw a late 1st gen Toyota Century and got so derailed I had to leave a comment"
oh this place is unreal for cars. that thing was parked on rainier ave for like 2 months and then disappeared again, I can't believe I managed to catch it at the same time that I got my ancient DSLR working.
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.
Having now listened to the whole thing I have to really admire this. It's got that thing like how a science teacher tells you every year that what you learnt the year before was just the basic version and that you need to learn how it really works, with a brand new twist in the tail every 15 minutes
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!
TH-cam did it's job bringing me here. I'm an avid Technology Connections watcher. This channel has a similar vibe but a different flavor and I am all for having more tech content to binge. I hope my comment helps push your channel to even more people!
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).
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.
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.
"Not enough memory for scanning? Why?" to find out it was out of disk space just sent me. It feels like the IT experience, distilled.
1:36:00 "nobody was ready for their strongest potions" I see you Chris, I see you. In a perfect world....
I think a lot of scanner tech can be probably tracked to IBM to mid 60s, where they had various optical reading devices. And maybe Xerox too. Some IBM models from late 60s supported automated document feeding, sheets, rolls, forms, but also hand writing recognition (some were simpler and only supported special fonts or mark sheets), but all in essence were digital device with scanning and in principle could produce bitmaps of scanned documents. There was simply no use of so big bitmaps on early computers, and storage would be too big. Customers wanted not bitmaps, but actual data on these pages, so black-and-white and digitizing text was what they needed. As these were all expensive, and for business use, they all were essentially with automated documented feed, and document moving on rollers under the scanning elements. Example would be something like IBM 1288 from 1968. And that is advanced model already. Many earlier models, used various tricks, and only really supported reading and recognizing text, not because they didn't know how to read a bitmap, but more because they didn't know how to write algorithm to process the image into a text, so they used some other methods. At the end of a day, businesses wanted to read some stuff written to them (banks checking checks, forms, census reports, tax forms, etc), and get that into a computer. And this is also why you will not find many advertisements for these things, they were not a consumer product, or associated with image / photo processing (I would not be surprised tho if some similar were used by military to analyze satellite photos for example, etc). And for massive amount of document input, flatbed would be inferior. Flatbed only makes sense when imputing very few documents, or document cannot be rolled / curved, like small photos, single slide negatives, books.
Flatbed were more costly because you needed 1) precision rods, 2) align entire travel, so optics is in focus, 3) move possibly heavy assembly, 4) with early tech utilize mirrors and complex optics, because sensing element was too heavy and too complex to move along. 5) add a glass and case. While roller design, well just some rollers, a stepper motor, and single axis alignment needed, no precision rods or bearings; and similar to other tech like printers, typewriters, etc,
CCD sensors definitively started mono-chrome. They used multiple sensors and color splitter to achieve color. Similar to DLP projectors. Mono-chrome CCD sensors are still used to this day in astronomy and industrial sensing, and barcode scanners, due to their better efficiency, lower noise, and higher resolution. There is no such things as color CCD sensor really. You can put some filters in front of each pixel, and that is what color CCD often means, but that is more expensive.
There are sensors that can detect all 3 visible primary colors using a single sensor with no Bayer filter. It is called Foveon X3, now part of Sigma. They are really neat, and it is possible to get cameras with them (albait older models with older sensors; the new sensor is in development for many years, and might see production in 2025). Still 3 separate CCDs will be better at very low light conditions, but Foveon X3 should be cheaper, simpler, and all color channels inherently aligned.
EDIT: I should have watched to the end. I see you mentioned some of these things.
I am also sure multi-pass scanning is still a thing in some markets, like negative and film. Including IR pass to detect dust and scratches, and visible light pass at different gains to get way more dynamic range.
Also check patent US3011020A from 1959 (Original Filed March 30, 1954) for example. And references / citations there.
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.
"Theres gonna be a lot of styrophoam noise here. please hold!" i appreciate that warning especialy as a person with autism.
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
1:29:12 The main issue with Bayer filters in not just that they sample distinct points and and merge that, that is just space division multiplexing and we do that in reverse with most display technologies (except 3 chip projectors which use the prisms, 3 tube CRT projectors which just use alignment and single chip DPL projectors which do time division multiplexing with a color wheel just like the multipass and color flickering scanners). The issue is that the resolution of the color image sensor (in number of pixels) is given by the resolution of the monocrome sensor (in number of monochrome photosites) behind the Bayer pattern filter. And of those pixels a half are green, a quarter are blue and a quarter are red. This means that an algorithm is needed to look at nearby pixels to determine the actual color of a pixel and this means that just like with YUV or YPbCR video where often the chroma resolution is far less then (a quarter of?) the luma resolution, the same issue applies to Bayer filter sensors at a hardware level.
There is at least one alternative to the Bayer grid or using prism to split the image for cameras called the Foveon X3 sensor by Sigma and it works by having each light frequency penetrate to different depths into the chip so the photosites for each color are behind each other. Edit: and you just mentioned Foveon.
Also now with incredibly high pixel count sensors we can use pixel binning but I am not sure how smart each pixel binning approach is. With very high resolution sensors we can actually dedicate 4 photosites (or more) behind different color filters to a single pixel. I am not sure if any of the pixel binning algorithms take advantage of this or if they still apply the bayer pattern correction algorithm and then an algorithm to combine full color pixels together into one pixel. Capturing RAW of course means you get a choice on what algorithms are applied and how. But pixel binning in the end means sacrificing light sensitivity for better accuracy, in other (incorrect) words, sacrificing luma for chroma.
So over all just 3 practical ways to do electronic (and maybe not only electronic) color imaging: physically splitting and joining color channels, space division multiplexing and time division multiplexing.
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.
1:00:31 Bonus points for mentioning the Lena picture. We used that picture in a class on image processing while doing my computer engineering major. And that was in 2010. Yes, that picture was used for DECADES.
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.
Has to be my favorite video of yours thus far. I was glued for the whole time. The amount of research, both relevant and quite complete. This video answered most of my own questions in a pretty definitive and conclusive manner. Wow, thank you.
1h40 passed so quickly. This is documentary level. Congratulations.
In 1985 to 1990 your assuming somethings :
1. That the person scanning the file would be manipulating it entirely in RAM at full resolution. A lot of software at the time let you assemble files with images without actually rendering the document with the image visible, they just showed the outline of it.
2. Odds were good that software existed to scan to harddrive without displaying all of it at once or without displaying it at full color. I had coworkers who were laying out posters for technical conferences and they were often stuck using page swapping to see parts of a graphic or parts of a poster at a time. The displays also often only worked on grey scale when the images were color in the final print.
Both methods persisted well into the mid 90s.
You're absolutely right, and in fact PC Paintbrush *is* working from the HDD, but Picture Publisher isn't; it expects to load the entire thing into RAM and errors out if it's too big. I'm not saying that it was impossible, more that... the likelihood of running into problems was high, especially in the form of "already spent $250 on this picture editor only to find out it can't work that way; now have a $600 scanner and a useless editing package."
@@CathodeRayDude Ah but in those days you didn't just buy the stuff and then find out how it worked. Not for the amount of money it all cost. You looked at reviews, you asked vendors, you got product demos on VHS tape or laserdisc, and you went to tradeshows to see things run. In 1985 - 1990 these weren't things you were doing at home so you were I am assuming someone working at least in an office who could do all this. Once more we used to have in person computer shops which did demos. I remember like 5 of them around rt 128/Cambridge here in Massachusetts. Yes I know I was in a privileged place for this for that time but if you were spending this much money in 1985, you would make the drive.
Incidentally I might still have some of those product demo recordings from the 1980 to 1990 era some where.
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.
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
This is genuinely a thing I look forward to regularly - I'm glad you exist and do things like this, thanks!
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
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.
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 🌈
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.
Half-tone is still used in most of modern printing, including laser toner printing, since it's just easier to have a high resolution than to print shades of a color. Your assumption about half-tone being better for compression is likely spot-on though, since the CCITT Group 4 compression (used in TIFFs and faxes since 1989) deals really well with aligned columns of black or white pixels.
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.
71-yr-old here. The 7400 series TTL logic goes way back for me as I worked on the military 5400 version in 1974 and the first hobbyist 7400 for tinkering. My film darkroom photography goes back to 1968. I waited to get a computer until 1999 so that the memory and resolution was high enough to scan my film and slide images. My first scanner was a holder fed HP S-20. It did fine for 35mm but I had to wait until I went past the Minolta Dimage IV scanner with the 16-bit to my 2008 Epson scanner that does 6x7 cm (120) roll film media. The old photo enlarger and wet processing stuff packed away and the scanner and the old win 7 computer remains. The Epson has a broader density depth for those dark slide astrophotos as to not saturate the bright star images on the negatives as well. Done in 16 bit depth, these images are suited for the latest astrophoto image processing software to bring out the details the old wet darkroom ever achieved.
Stay in good health and keep up on your doctor visits. Moms in the hospital at 71, she just had her birthday. And many people seem to be konking out. Were you Navy or Army?
@@MickeyMishra I was in the US Navy.
@@Starphot Best choice out of all of them.
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.
I remember watching those computer chronicle and reading those PCWorld / Pc Mag, as Staples first opened in the province of Quebec in ~1989, the Logitech Scanman were selling hot off the shelf.. and the price of a monochrome flat bed scanner was like 6x, by 1991 the Scanman we’re being liquidated at $99, bought one and returned it immediately and decided to save for a flatbed that was by then 3x for monochrome and the Scan-jet I honestly don’t recall but going to say about $700.
Don't ever stop doing what you do, this is glorious! Qapla'!
An almost two hour video about scanners and the nuances of the tech that underpinned them in 90’s?
Fuck yeah, let me get a stiff drink and just sit back and enjoy while clinging to the edge of my seat.
This is the type of content that pushed me to throwing in on Patreon.
Keep doing what you’re doing CRD.
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
30 years ago a company put 3 million dollars into developing that port adapter and we’ve come so far in the future that we can just eyeball the fact that this device
“Doesn’t do shit” 😂
I love it
Well, that was an hour and forty minutes of my life well spent.
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 miss my slim and sexy CanoScan LIDE scanner. It was slow over LPT and always sounded like it was destroying itself while scanning, but I still loved that thing.
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.
Oh man that AGFA SnapScan image is bringing back _memories._ If my family didn't have that exact unit, they had one mighty similar. We _also_ had one of those Logitech palm scanners, although I never used that one much myself.
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 can't decide if you make really boring things interesting, I'm a huge nerd that finds scanners interesting, or both, but I can marathon your videos for hours man.
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 remember early 90s dad bought his second pc a pentium full tower from Escom with SCSI scanner. The card plus io card and sound etc was a logistical nightmare getting irq and DNA jumpers setup I spent hours as a kid figuring it out. That scanner was dog slow and made so much noise
We had an HP desk jet 500c which cost £550. Dad later added an office jet black and white but scanner printer and fax machine in one.
When he started his own business he bought an Epson A3+ printer ink jet and it cost well over £1000 at the time it was a real beast.
Remember saving up £40 for a soundblaster just so I could hear the guys get run over and squashed in dune 2.
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.
A thing to note is that HAL first really became a thing with Windows NT, drivers for Windows 1, 2, and 3 were mostly janky things ontop of DOS called VxDs. Windows 98 introduced the WDM abstraction layer for drivers, which NT later adopted ontop of its HAL.
Hence you'd find things like joysticks, scanners, printers, etc. working on Windows 2 but break on Windows 3, etc.
Not to mention janky software support in many cases, where drivers sometimes shipped with modules for specific apps to actually make their product work.
It's fair that VxDs were "thinner" than what's used by the actual, literal HAL, but the point I was getting at is that even by Windows 1.0, apps were expected to talk to most hardware through the OS (and could cause total chaos if they didn't), and by Windows/386 this was fairly well enforced - the whole point of protected mode being that apps can't just touch memory or I/O without permission after all. So yeah, not every aspect of the early Windows driver system was robust by any means, but DOS on the other hand was a total wild west that didn't even attempt to provide a framework for common hardware interfaces beyond... the mouse, I think?
For graphics specifically, I believe there was never any BIOS or DOS assistance in smoothing over the differences between cards other than shortcuts to set modes on the basic IBM CGA/EGA/etc. Certainly nothing as luxurious as Windows' device independent bitmaps, or the paradise that would be the VESA extensions - imagine the ramifications if _those_ had existed ten years earlier.
All the same, I was probably overzealous in how I put it.
My dad used to work installing those $90000 ImagiTex scanners mentioned at 1:10:18 . They were part of DuPonts fully digital printing systems. The scanner itself was a huge flatbed scanner the size of a small car, and it hooked up with a proprietary interface to a 386 QNX workstation with a something like a 1000 x 1000 grayscale monitor and a digitizer tablet.
You made printers interesting enough to listen to you talk about while sewing/crocheting, so great job! I love when people do research in depth like this. I am the type of person to ask 'what was the advent of/first _' questions, so you satisfy that need I have for information to be consolidated. I usually check channels like yours for such questions I have related to tech🤓
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!
There are scaners going all the way back to 1920s. There is a video here on youtube will a full workflow where someone takes a picture, devlop it, scans it to a drum. Radio in to a phone network (yea, that how it worked prior to mobile phones). Then transfer the photo via the phone line and then edge it to a plate for printing. From photo to print in half a hour.
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
Your friends drum scanner looks so cool, over the moon impractical, and I love it.
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.
I love that you refer to the scanner by its proper box name the entire video.
Very cool, the video just got weirder and weirder - to see you surrounded by a mountain of enormous videocams like King Of The TrashCams was hilarious! In a previous life I was a printer, like the job not the device, and yep we did have a whole floor dedicated to image processing and plate making with drum scanners having an entire room to themselves.
Wow, now I know more about scanners than I ever thought I would. Despite scanner hardware seemingly being basically finished from the start, the multiple mentions of early scanner software makes it sound miserable at times. Industrial equipment is always a terrifying wall due to so much bespoke hardware as well as just general availability. Great video!
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.
That Agfa SnapScan 1212P was actually an amazing scanner, with the right software. At that time, it was all I could afford for my DTP hobby. I had the parallel port version, which felt like the cheap version compared to a SCSI scanner. What I discovered was that Agfa had professional grade software called Fotolook 3.5 for their big, professional flatbed scanners costing thousands of dollars that also worked with that humble little 1212P, at least in Windows NT 4.1. The scans it produced with that software rivaled the pro Agfas they had at the plate makers. Those guys looked at my scans on their professional, calibrated monitors and couldn't tell the difference in scans when made at the same resolution. The secret was in the color profiles that FotoLook used plus the fact that it could access the raw data from the scan sensor. I still have some of the images I scanned on that scanner and they still have an amazing color quality to them, similar to Agfa film.
No better way to start my day than seeing a new CRD video just dropped