That moment of horror when I realize: * I had one of these as recently as four years ago. * It was working and even had the original SCSI card with it. * I donated it because of space reasons. Absolutely stellar demonstration of this scanner's capabilities. I don't recall having nearly as much trouble setting it up but I also had that scanner from new. Thank you!
I used to have a BlackWidow scanner years ago, did something quite good dpi wise and that was optical. It also was able to scan very deep so you could scan PCB's with tall components and not get black patches. Got rid of it mainly because of lakc of driver supprot in either 2000 or XP. Of course these days I thibk there are Linux drivers for it. A shame it's gone really.
@@g00gleminus96 Yes. But seriously, I was facing my own move while at the same time, my parents were moving too and a whole host of "Tech from my childhood" landed at donation centers. I don't regret everything that left. I didn't even initially regret the loss of this scanner. It was my first experience with SCSI and I was always impressed at how much faster and higher quality our scanner was vs. the scanners at school. I never had a desk big enough for that scanner and my parents didn't want it back.
The artifact you're referring to as chromatic aberration is actually misregister at the printing press due to improperly trapped artwork. Solid black areas (even text) are usually printed with other colors underneath. "4-color" black is very common in order to reproduce very dark blacks because black ink alone isn't opaque enough and appears gray in large areas. What you (and the scanners) are seeing is a tiny amount of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow hanging out from underneath the black.
That can't be entirely true, since he shows three different examples from three different scans; and all three show different aberration. The one at 40:30 shows green aberration to the top and left, purple to the bottom and right. The one at 40:43 shows red aberration to the top and blue to the bottom. The one at 40:57 shows essentially none. These are three scans of the *same* printed material. At *best* only one of them can be accurate (probably the one at 40:57, since it's extremely unlikely the printing on this box was using 4-color black for the small text being shown).
I remember in high school working on an Epson large format printer that had the typical Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow cartridges, but which also featured a separate grey, black, and photo black. I'm guessing the last was to allow it to use a more heavily pigmented black ink. I do still prefer 4-color black, though, as it has a certain visual quality similar to India Ink where it has a shimmer of the other colors that are hidden beneath it. I find that deeply appealing, even if it isn't the most color accurate way to do so. My high school also had the rather uncommon full-color crayon printers, which used a wax-resin polymer as the pigment carrier. Very unusual, took several minutes to pre-heat before printing. The printed area came out very glossy and quite good quality, with the faint smell of melted crayons and a pleasant warmth. One of my favorite weird printers.
Fun fact about the ScanJet 4C/3C: they're known to be good at making music - rather, their stepper motor. Such model is used by the Floppotron project. I also had one a few years back when making a smaller scale of the project myself :)
I have one too (I think mine is a Scanjet 5 something?), can confirm, set the SCSI ID to 0 and hold the SCAN button while you power up the scanner, then once the LED on the front flashes, let go and watch the magic happen. On the parallel port version you just need to just hold the scan button and let go when the LED flashes :) Unfortunately my Scanjet looks worse for wear, the foam thing on the lid degraded, so I just slapped together a piece of thick cardboard, I really need to find a replacement for this kludge.
@@gorak9000 What's specific to these scanners is the wide harmonics range their motors can produce. They handle the high pitched notes pretty good in a way that's pleasant to hear. I tried a few late-90s scanners for my initial setup and ended up using a ScanJet 4C and Epson Perfection 1500 because that's what the Floppotron used and because other scanner motors would either have a non pleasant sound or a too high speed/pitch that would make the other mechanical parts skip steps and create jamming noises.
@@Anaerin That's correct! The ScanJet 5P from Alexis Trinquet (if I got the model correctly) should play Ode to Joy. I think other HP models play different Beethoven music.
I like how at the end, he talks as if the scanner is the very last in existence, and as life itself, that old scanner is a precious gift bestowed to us by the universe 🤣
He says this shit alot man. I suspect he's in the spectrum as he's incredibly intelligent but his affinities are at odds. I say as it takes one to know one haha
@100Underscores I said I was and I find it easy to spot others. It's not an insult. Thanks for reminding me haha. I'm not ashamed of my mental health or accompanied high iq.
I still have a pretty good Epson flatbed with a slide/negative lamp in the lid, last driver for it is older than time. VueScan keeps it ticking over nicely. 🤓
We used 4c's with the auto document feeders back at Wright-Patt AFB in the mid 90's on Win NT 4.0 on Adaptec 16-bit SCSI cards in Micron workstation computers. They were awesome scanners!
First one is failing calibration because the lamp is EOL. You might be able to do a lampectomy from the busted one, and get the unit working again, though you also might be able to buy the lamps, though not from HP. Look for lamps from an Arcus scanner (where they are a spare part, and are meant to be replaced, unlike HP) and then figure out how to mount it in place of the HP one.
I remember getting my first PDA!!! It was around 2001 and I paid about £400! It was an invaluable tool when trying to find illegal raves in the UK countryside! The satellite navigation was very accurate. All of the road angles were exact, and you could use it like a rally co-driver! It allowed us to avoid police roadblocks and find alternative routes instantly!
When I was scanning old VHS and Laserdisc covers to make custom DVD and Blu-ray sleeves, I had access to a true 1200 dpi scanner. I didn't like dealing with the Moire pattern that would always show up. I got some red, green, and blue filters I think from hobby lobby, and scanned in monochrome three times. It really helped retain the detail and reduce the Moire pattern.
Top tip to prevent moire while scanning: if an even number of DPI(let's say 600) produces moire try scanning at an odd number of DPI (let's say 300). Usually this will not produce the moiré.
We had one of these in my post-graduate research group in the late 90s. I used it a lot for scanning macro photos of experiments... which were then used for image analysis. I never used it over 600dpi, for the reasons you've discussed.
Fascinating! Back in 1996 I visited someone who had themselves a drum scanner which they used as part of their work at home. What was more incredible was the 16 fully speced Sparc Stations all hooked up just to acquire and process the image . I cant recall the RAM numbers or the scanners resolution, but for the time the numbers were mind boggling.
You had the opposite experience that I had. I bought a USB scanner at Savers, with all of the original packaging materials, CD, USB cable, power cable, etc. (I think I paid a whopping $12.99 for it.) I plugged it in to a computer, it was immediately recognized, and just worked perfectly without any intervention or complication. It was a fortunate find, because shortly after that my dad passed away and I was able to post a bunch of cool old pictures we had of him, my mom, myself and my sisters on Facebook. People don't realize how important it is to have a scanner. I always keep one around for photos I find that I want to create a cloud back-up of, and for documents that I might need to send a high quality image of.
I got a old school USB scanner off my dad, its better than the 3 in 1 printer i got for Christmas. it's biggest downside is I have to use a Windows XP machine to use it since that's its last supported os for drivers so it's also one of the many reasons why I have a dedicated XP machine for hardware and software.
Believe it or not people today actually just take pictures of documents and printed photos with their crappy phone camera, and the camera software on the phone will just do some basic perspective correction (if you do it correctly, I bet most people forget to do this). Blew my mind but apparently that's "good enough". 😐
@@s8wc3 I can do that. If I use a table, a tripod with a phone holder, good lighting, and something like Microsoft Lens (which does perspective correction and edge detection on pages). The Pixel 7 Pro camera should produce good results. Or, instead of setting up a complicated filming rig, I can put the paper on my flatbed scanner and with a button press have a high quality image. 🤣 Obviously you have to use what you have and what's on hand, but I try to use the best option I have rather than the worst.
@@Cyberdeamon depending on the scanner, you should see if vuescan has drivers for it, they have lots of drivers for old 32 bit scanners, both scsi and usb
I honestly didn't think I would be interested for almost an hr. But here I am, at the end of the video, hooked on every word 🤣 This is why this man is one of the best in vintage tech.
Wow! Thank you so much for this nostalgic view on the HP SJ4c! I used to demo these in shops, when I was sent out by HP as a so-called HP Ambassador, and I really liked this piece of hardware. I really wanted one of these to play with, but the price tag was inhibitive for me. Thanks again for giving this scanner a respectful and in-depth review!
Really nice scanner. I worked many times on an HP ScanJet III with an PowerMac and Windows when I was in university in the early to mid 90s. It truly was a great device!
Lol yep... I used one to scan in a parking permit at college and used the software to move the numbers around and the color printer to print it back out... As long as you didn't park illegally, nobody cared because all they were doing was looking for the presence of the tag on the mirror, they didn't care what number it was! We made a bunch of money making passes... lol...
I do a lot of scanning of and reading scanned documents at various archives and other research institutions (I am a Masters student). You can tell in some runs of archived douments were done on older flourecent bulbs, as their colours slowly shift as the series and run goes on. It's amazing. Cool to see the tech they probably were using to scan them (yeah, I'm one of the first GenZ/"Zoomers"). Most modern archive scanners are overhead ones (often Zeutschel Zeta's) but they're all LED based now. Most are also 600dpi, which is fine until you start trying to scan larger doucuments with them (the higher native dpi settings really help when scanning old broadsheets that are HUGE!).
I supported HP ScanJet scanners 1997-1998, and I'm sure I have the drivers and software for multiple models... somewhere. Might be on a Zip100 disk, or 3.5" disk. Seeing that old triangular SCSI care gave me a big smile! I actually got ScanJet 5 discounted because it lacked a power cable -- which HP sent me for free. Gosh, this really takes me back. Congratulations! PS: When you pointed out no buttons, I actually thought, "Well, no? Why would a scanner have buttons?" I had forgotten-- even my own ScanJet!
Really cool video :) That process of scanning was so advanced, splitting the light with a prism and all blew my mind. When I got my first scanner the IBM Flatbed scanner, it was so cool. My computer was completely isolated in it's own world. With that scanner I could scan things from the real world and get it into the computer. To me that was so amazing.
Love the dedication to getting an old scanner to work. You are well on your way to having a deck of HP Scanjet SCSI controller cards. This is why I watch channels like this. I also remember using one of these back in the day, the design is quite memorable.
The scanner wars of HP, Epson, Canon, Microtek, and UMAX. My old High School had a ScanJet 4C in the computer lab in '96. My folks had a Microtek for their Mac. The HP was super dog-slow, but the scan quality was great for its day.
I longed for the "Linotype Hell" scanners like the "Saphir" or "Topaz" in the late 90s. They have a dynamic range that was well beyond the human visual capabilities and you can get them for really cheap now if you have the space 🙂 My father got a used "Apple Scanner" with 16 grayscale 300dpi. We used it extensively with his newly bought "Performa 475" from 1993 to 1997 until i got my own Computer.
I really like old HP documents. They have a full extensive writeup on exactly how one of their impedance analyzers works. It's amazing to me they made these thorough writeups on products they made, especially when some were in a very high price bracket and used some novel ideas or processing techniques.
When a company was spending more than the price of a house on a test instrument (like early HP Spectrum Analysers that used Vector Graphics) the least you would expect is some decent manuals.
This was also before China started stealing all the IP they could get their grubby little hands on... rarely is information like this made public anymore, regardless of patents in place or not.
Neat, this is the first flatbed scanner i ever used, in high school photography class in 1995. Was connected to a Mac IIci with Photoshop 3.0. I made my first web pages on it.
An old scsi scanner and linux saved my bacon many years back for a job I was doing. The sound of that HP working brings back memories of the days at the arts org. i worked at. Good video!
I remember selling these scanners at future shop. Lots of returns and setup was not fun. When it worked people were really happy with it. We had many refurbs come back of that model.
This topic was right up my alley and I enjoyed it stop to start. One thing I had to learn about scanners, was that it is the sensor type and not the DPI that matter. The newer thin Canon you showed and even the enterprise Canon you showed at 47:11 have a CIS sensor (Contact Image Sensor as shown on the specs page at 47:11). But that HP uses a CCD (like a camera). While CIS can be thin and is fast, there is a difference in how the fine details are rendered. The Epson V600 is a modern CCD scanner that is cheap(ish) and has consistent results and uses a LED light source that doesn't fade over time. I scan at 800DPI for a balance of speed and accuracy. 1200DPI is really the tops I would recommend for documents/printed material. Anything over that is slow and bloated file sizes (easily over 400MB per image).
I've watched half a dozen of your videos now and--just subscribed. I've always loved The Computer Chronicles, LGR, and others, but you got something great here. I would just like that say thanks for this content, super informative and very enjoyable! :)
I worked for a school district as a computer tech during the time when these were brand new. I helped unbox and set a few of these up and it was always a pleasure to use them. I specifically remember that 16 bit card with the downwards angle too. Great scanners, we even had a transparency adaptor for it. Good to see one still out there and working!
Thanks for the good story telling. You hooked me with the good story about the scanner and the journey you had to take to get it going again. I might even try one of my old scanners again.
Loved my HP ScanJet 4C. Was my first scanner, bought it during my 2nd year at graphic design college. At the same time I bought also my first external scsi zip drive (it was EPSON branded). Combined with Photoshop 4.0 and CorelDraw (can''t remember version) I started my affair with digital design. Still going strong :)
I had a SCSI HP Scanjet on my work machine in the late 90's. I was a web designer/developer (still am) before digital photography, so I used the HECK out of it for projects. It was insanely fast, and turned out great scans. The machine I had was an absolute SCSI beast. I had that scanner, a Sony floptical, SyQuest 44/88, Plextor 4x burner, and FOUR double-stacked 2GB RAID drive enclosures. on the SCSI2-UFUW daisy chain. At the time it was probably a 10,000 dollar or more setup. Dual Pentium Pro 200 with 4 gigs of ram, it was by far the most beastly computer I'd ever seen at the time, and I loved it so. Had a 21" Sony Trinitron 1600x1200 monitor and the SCSI controller was a PCI Adaptec SCSI2. Even the internal hard drive was SCSI, which made it a complete ripper.
You know how i know we're all complete fucking dorks? we all clicked on this and watched an almost hour long video about a fucking scanner from 1996. Enjoyed it too.
Wow: had this box in my place for many months to scan in 1000's of pages of employee records as part of a intranet project for a Dutch company. It was part of my first project at my new employer and together we started offering internet/intranet projects to our customers. After this project I got hired by a regional cable TV networks company who wanted to start with cable -internet and assisted with the initial setup and did setup the first servers for email and home-page hosting and also designed the backbone for the Com21 systems... Stayed at that customer for 3years but never forget that 1st scanning and intranet project there .. changed my life up to today 👍👍
Oh, I remember my first PARALLEL PORT image scanner. It cost a damn fortune to buy, and if you knocked it up to its highest resolution (plus 24 bit "True colour"), a sheet of A4 would take 5+ MINUTES to scan and transfer to the PC. I'd have friends see what my kit could do, then predictably ask if I'd scan and enlarge their 50ish holiday photos, then I'd have to explain that it would take several hours of my limited free time to do them, and run through at least £100 of ink jet cartridges.......... "Roughly how much did the local photo lab quote you?...... Oh, you haven't asked them yet?..... Hmmm.". :D
AAh, the memories! Just before launch, we had a lovely lady from Greeley, Colorado come out to explain this scanner to us. For some obscure reason, the launch was in the former Ansett bus terminal in Brisbane Australia. The floor was covered in carpet, but was not even. Despite that, it was a launch of a brand new product which was world-beating, and I loved being a part of that.
I've thrown one of these in landfill during covid lockdown whilst renovating my father's old office. It hadn't been used in years but was in the cupboard with reams of paper stacked on top. Doh!
I had one of these back in the late '90s. I worked at a large company, and found it discarded. It was amazing the waste that place generated. I don't remember what SCSI card I used, but I do remember that I never had any issues. It just worked, and very well. Ultimately I rid of it years later due to it being SCSI, and not wanting to deal with that interface anymore moving forward. I do miss it sometimes. It was a giant behemoth of a thing, but was a pleasure to use.
a shocking trip down memory lane. in the early 90s, I used to have to do OCR on actual typewriter written manuscripts (with handwritten annotations and corrections) with a ScanJet II under DOS using OmniPage. ...and then proof-read and edit the whole mess before sending it on to DTP. what a time sink. but then again, still faster than just transcribing it in the first place *edit* not to mention scanning and photoshopping several thousand product photos and schematics from a thousand+ page pneumatic modules manufacturer's product catalogue (they just had started expanding into the eastern European market that had just opened up, and they'd lost their original source materials). we then stitched it all together again in Ventura Publisher with Czech, Russian, Hungarian (and then some) translations
addendum, watching you trying to scan a whole page at 2400dpi: for that time, b/w drawings in "good" resolution to send to the print shop? 150dpi. greyscale pictures? 300. well good enough for standard A4/magazine/US letter printing. need higher res, maybe for a billboard? get someone with a rotary scanner to do the job. due to the amounts of data, such scan job and your XPress files would meet up at the printing plant and some professional would merge them there, then send you the litho films for each color layer to approve before issuing a pre-print
addendum #2: IDK which version of OmniPage you've got there, but theoretically it should be able to "scan" a B/W bitmap file. atleast the very early versions did, as there wasn't enough memory to both run the scanner and OCR software at the same time. tl,dr: scan full page, safe as bitmap (0/1), then run OCR on it
As someone who had a Scanjet 5P this bring back happy scan noise memories, the SCSI HP scanners were just so much faster compared to the cheaper Parallel ones and compared to the other manufacturers of the time
Likley the one with the lamp staying on is failing to read the white reference strip at the underside of the scanner home position. Either the ccd itself has failed, its ribbon cable or the mainboard.
I have an HP 3570c that I still use to these days, so that's 20odd years old, external PSU failed pretty early on. Biggest plus of this scanner is the very accurate scanning and depth of scan. I can easily put anything on the flat bed and it'd scan hyperfocal from the flat bed plate. Absolute peach to scan electronic boards and non easily foldable volumes.
I miss my old HP 4C, SCSI interface died on it, HP 5P I replaced it with never seemed as good on the colour accuracy, but as a bonus the 5P had the ode to joy Easter Egg demo which was pretty cool, SCSI card wise I used the Adaptec 2940 PCI cards on PC with win2k and xp and it also worked on my PowerMac 7200 on MacOS 8.6.
In the mid 90's. I worked at the Greeley, Colorado facility. R&D for the scanner division. We built the carriage lens and filter alignment robots. We had a way for the testers in the line to assure we had a 99% pass rate on the carriage to lens/filter alignment. They would manually pull on the carriage on the retest to assure the test would pass. So the vignetting you are getting is from HP's accepted quality control at it's finest. If you are lucky and out of the 3 units you have. one of those carriages may have legitimately have passed the QC test. You will find initials and the word pass written on the bottom of the carriage. If the word pass is written neatly then that is one that may have truly passed QC without issues.
I had one of those back in 95. Had much of the same problems. Found out that it was not 2400 dpi and after a long process of frustration, took it back to Best Buy. I believe it was around $1000. Was disappointed by all the marketing fluff. Thanks for the great video. Was just what I needed to cheer me up after having a bad day. Best to you!
Small concern. You should test a scanner with a true analog photo, not a print, a print like a jewel case insert or a manual will be offset printed which is already ugly if magnified. Or just put something not printed in there like one of the ISA cards or whatever that has a flat face to see... you're adding interpolation to an already rasterized print. (EDIT: I was just about 20 minutes into the video, I see you addressed that later... good job :D)
Just chiming in to say that I too am still using the HP ScanJet 4C, attached to a PowerMac G4 using the Adaptec 2906 SCSI adapter (its Mac OS 9 drivers are, amazingly, still available on their site). The reason why the old HP ScanJet scanners have my preference is that they have great depth-of-field. I use it to scan calculators for my calculator museum website (it refers to this video now as well). And just like you, I love the sound these scanners make whilst scanning. It's so satisfying! And just like you I've got a small pile of them. A working HP ScanJet IIcx with transparency unit, a HP ScanJet 4P, a HP ScanJet 4C and a broken HP ScanJet 3C (its PSU died).
Interpolation is the scourge of digital imaging and while it may have some uses it shouldn't be allowed in marketing statements. I once saw a camera that was interpolated from about ~1000ish pixels wide to 4k. It was the stuff of nightmares. I refer to interpolated resolutions in **DPLIE** for this very reason.
I have one of these scanners in my basement with other old equipment. I even have the transparency too for it (it was an add on lid that you could swap out and it would light up during a scan. Used it to scan hundreds of slides for a friend years ago.) It was an amazing working scanner when I used it last.
Ah, that takes me back. So many vendors. I worked at a Mac-based DTP shop and we spent so much time testing and figuring out calibrations, and doing them regularly to fight color drift. The last shop I worked at actually got a Kodak Prophecy system and this high-end laser drum scanner for industrial quality. At the other extreme, I remember something called Thunderscan that you placed inside an Apple ImageWriter printer and it would make the print head move back and forth and the platen to advance so it would scan documents that way. Slow as hell, of course, and pretty low res and I think bw/grayscale only.
I recall someone, maybe Canon, making a printer where you could swap the pint head out for a scan head. Also the cheapo hand scanners and even motorised hand scanners which would drive themselves along in a plastic tray. At the turn of the century with cheap MFPs every charity shop was full of parallel port scanners. I paid more for a replacement PSU for a Mustek than the scanner itself.
The smug face you're making on 34:43 is totally earned. You better bask in that glory man. What a monumental task getting that scanner up and running, then getting it running on modern hardware! Amazing!
I still have a 4C that I bought fresh from the factory in the 90's. Effectively, it forced me to become a SCSI expert, (I always used it with Adaptec cards). This machine gave me a good times and a good results in my graphics business. I stopped using it mainly because of the large volume and space it takes up on any table. But I plan to take it out of storage and bring it back to life soon. Thanks for this video-review. 👍👋
The 4c was the best scanner I ever had! If you had the 4c ADF it was awesome! With Paperport I was able to scan tons of documents and pictures! My scanner lasted me eleven years under heavy load. I miss my 4c.
Wow! I sold and installed a few of these back in the early 90's... The design software we were using them with cost $7,500AUD back then. How the times have changed... Great vid!
An advantage of the long optical path is greater depth of field for scanning objects like circuit boards. A few mm height difference makes little difference when the focal length is 50cm.
Yes! My current scanner is the CCD unit in my 2008-model Canon multifunction printer (a high end unit with film scanning capability, too). I have scanned PCBs before, and it’s so much better than CIS scanners. But it’s not as deep, both figuratively and literally, as the standalone scanners of the 90s.
Wow! this brings back memories! i had one of these way back when and ended up selling it for a USB Scanner years later... after watching your video I wish I had kept it. :P
Back in the day I was in charge of making digital documentation for the oil industry equipment we made. It was the first contract where digital documentation was required. A Hp 3C with document feeder and a Plex? cd burner with caddy were acquired for the project. I took months to scan our sub suppliers documentation and incorporate then into our own documentation with files from Autocad, Word, Excel etc.. Using Word button function to make links to chapters and figures took work.
I bought a Trust scanner a long time ago but at the time I just took it for granted and didn't think about how good it was 20 years ago. I found some scans recently and they are absolutely phenomenal, the detail and depth in them are outstanding. I'm going to check my loft to see if I still have it.
A typical florescent lamp is good for 20k hours. With 3 total lamps, scanning regularly, you''ll be set for decades. I don't think you should worry. CCD scanners are also great for scanning populated PCBs. They can actually scan depth. Newer CIS scanners will only scan what's right up against the glass. That's the reason why I bought my Fujitsu FI-7260. Modern but still CCD. Thanks for the great video. Quite the adventure. I had a HP 5p and totally remember those software quirks.
Is that really chromatic aberration that you are seeing in your high res scanner? I think it might be just an artifact of subsampling by non-integer factors, similar to the colors you get on subpixel rendering.
My first scanner was an HP Scanjet 4C, bought for around $400 in the 1990s, which I connected to an existing SCSI card in the computer, I had that until I bought a CanoScan 8400F, which I'm still still using every day. The Scanjet 4C was still working perfectly when I gave it to a friend.
Could you pull a colour spectrum on that bulb when it's working correctly, then replace it with a tuned LED array that outputs something approximating that spectrum? (You'd need to diffuse the hell out of it, of course)
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That moment of horror when I realize:
* I had one of these as recently as four years ago.
* It was working and even had the original SCSI card with it.
* I donated it because of space reasons.
Absolutely stellar demonstration of this scanner's capabilities. I don't recall having nearly as much trouble setting it up but I also had that scanner from new. Thank you!
Don't feel too bad... I s-canned an extremely similar Mustek 15 years ago that was in perfect operating condition.
I used to have a BlackWidow scanner years ago, did something quite good dpi wise and that was optical. It also was able to scan very deep so you could scan PCB's with tall components and not get black patches. Got rid of it mainly because of lakc of driver supprot in either 2000 or XP. Of course these days I thibk there are Linux drivers for it. A shame it's gone really.
Space reasons as in volume or space reasons as in astronauts?
@@g00gleminus96 Yes.
But seriously, I was facing my own move while at the same time, my parents were moving too and a whole host of "Tech from my childhood" landed at donation centers. I don't regret everything that left. I didn't even initially regret the loss of this scanner. It was my first experience with SCSI and I was always impressed at how much faster and higher quality our scanner was vs. the scanners at school. I never had a desk big enough for that scanner and my parents didn't want it back.
@@g00gleminus96 ...or an OCR space recognition problem?
The artifact you're referring to as chromatic aberration is actually misregister at the printing press due to improperly trapped artwork. Solid black areas (even text) are usually printed with other colors underneath. "4-color" black is very common in order to reproduce very dark blacks because black ink alone isn't opaque enough and appears gray in large areas. What you (and the scanners) are seeing is a tiny amount of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow hanging out from underneath the black.
It should be possible to verify this under a microscope, or even a good magnifying glass. Possible short followup segment?
That can't be entirely true, since he shows three different examples from three different scans; and all three show different aberration. The one at 40:30 shows green aberration to the top and left, purple to the bottom and right. The one at 40:43 shows red aberration to the top and blue to the bottom. The one at 40:57 shows essentially none.
These are three scans of the *same* printed material. At *best* only one of them can be accurate (probably the one at 40:57, since it's extremely unlikely the printing on this box was using 4-color black for the small text being shown).
Congratulations on being an extremely smart person
I remember in high school working on an Epson large format printer that had the typical Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow cartridges, but which also featured a separate grey, black, and photo black. I'm guessing the last was to allow it to use a more heavily pigmented black ink. I do still prefer 4-color black, though, as it has a certain visual quality similar to India Ink where it has a shimmer of the other colors that are hidden beneath it. I find that deeply appealing, even if it isn't the most color accurate way to do so. My high school also had the rather uncommon full-color crayon printers, which used a wax-resin polymer as the pigment carrier. Very unusual, took several minutes to pre-heat before printing. The printed area came out very glossy and quite good quality, with the faint smell of melted crayons and a pleasant warmth. One of my favorite weird printers.
Fun fact about the ScanJet 4C/3C: they're known to be good at making music - rather, their stepper motor. Such model is used by the Floppotron project. I also had one a few years back when making a smaller scale of the project myself :)
You can do that with literally any stepper motor in anything that uses a stepper motor. It's nothing specific to these scanners.
I have one too (I think mine is a Scanjet 5 something?), can confirm, set the SCSI ID to 0 and hold the SCAN button while you power up the scanner, then once the LED on the front flashes, let go and watch the magic happen. On the parallel port version you just need to just hold the scan button and let go when the LED flashes :)
Unfortunately my Scanjet looks worse for wear, the foam thing on the lid degraded, so I just slapped together a piece of thick cardboard, I really need to find a replacement for this kludge.
I believe one of the test tools included with the 4C plays Fur Elise using the scanner's stepper motor.
@@gorak9000 What's specific to these scanners is the wide harmonics range their motors can produce. They handle the high pitched notes pretty good in a way that's pleasant to hear. I tried a few late-90s scanners for my initial setup and ended up using a ScanJet 4C and Epson Perfection 1500 because that's what the Floppotron used and because other scanner motors would either have a non pleasant sound or a too high speed/pitch that would make the other mechanical parts skip steps and create jamming noises.
@@Anaerin That's correct! The ScanJet 5P from Alexis Trinquet (if I got the model correctly) should play Ode to Joy. I think other HP models play different Beethoven music.
I like how at the end, he talks as if the scanner is the very last in existence, and as life itself, that old scanner is a precious gift bestowed to us by the universe 🤣
He says this shit alot man. I suspect he's in the spectrum as he's incredibly intelligent but his affinities are at odds. I say as it takes one to know one haha
@@jstro-hobbytech as someone who is on the spectrum as well, I concur, he definitely gives me that vibe.
@@jstro-hobbytech Thinking someone is on the spectrum because they get a bit excited about what they enjoy might actually make YOU on the spectrum
@@100Underscores You do realize that they just said they _too_ are on the spectrum, right?
@100Underscores I said I was and I find it easy to spot others. It's not an insult. Thanks for reminding me haha. I'm not ashamed of my mental health or accompanied high iq.
I use VueScan as my scanner software on modern Windows. It supports many old scanners, including my late 1990s HP scanner (HP ScanJet 5370C).
I still have a pretty good Epson flatbed with a slide/negative lamp in the lid, last driver for it is older than time. VueScan keeps it ticking over nicely. 🤓
And works in Linux too! 💕
We used 4c's with the auto document feeders back at Wright-Patt AFB in the mid 90's on Win NT 4.0 on Adaptec 16-bit SCSI cards in Micron workstation computers. They were awesome scanners!
First one is failing calibration because the lamp is EOL. You might be able to do a lampectomy from the busted one, and get the unit working again, though you also might be able to buy the lamps, though not from HP. Look for lamps from an Arcus scanner (where they are a spare part, and are meant to be replaced, unlike HP) and then figure out how to mount it in place of the HP one.
I remember getting my first PDA!!! It was around 2001 and I paid about £400! It was an invaluable tool when trying to find illegal raves in the UK countryside! The satellite navigation was very accurate. All of the road angles were exact, and you could use it like a rally co-driver! It allowed us to avoid police roadblocks and find alternative routes instantly!
Class
Absolutely love your videos. The enthusiasm you have for this retro tech makes these so much more interesting to watch.
I am usually not the person to like super long videos on TH-cam but you made this one so well it didn't even felt like 50 minutes.
When I was scanning old VHS and Laserdisc covers to make custom DVD and Blu-ray sleeves, I had access to a true 1200 dpi scanner. I didn't like dealing with the Moire pattern that would always show up. I got some red, green, and blue filters I think from hobby lobby, and scanned in monochrome three times. It really helped retain the detail and reduce the Moire pattern.
Top tip to prevent moire while scanning: if an even number of DPI(let's say 600) produces moire try scanning at an odd number of DPI (let's say 300). Usually this will not produce the moiré.
That Doom weapon mod segment was way too underappreciated. It even has the projectiles be the color beams it gives off to scan!
even better that he posted the link to the .wad file. that was good for some nonsense laughs in GZdoom
We had one of these in my post-graduate research group in the late 90s. I used it a lot for scanning macro photos of experiments... which were then used for image analysis. I never used it over 600dpi, for the reasons you've discussed.
Fascinating! Back in 1996 I visited someone who had themselves a drum scanner which they used as part of their work at home. What was more incredible was the 16 fully speced Sparc Stations all hooked up just to acquire and process the image . I cant recall the RAM numbers or the scanners resolution, but for the time the numbers were mind boggling.
You had the opposite experience that I had. I bought a USB scanner at Savers, with all of the original packaging materials, CD, USB cable, power cable, etc. (I think I paid a whopping $12.99 for it.) I plugged it in to a computer, it was immediately recognized, and just worked perfectly without any intervention or complication. It was a fortunate find, because shortly after that my dad passed away and I was able to post a bunch of cool old pictures we had of him, my mom, myself and my sisters on Facebook.
People don't realize how important it is to have a scanner. I always keep one around for photos I find that I want to create a cloud back-up of, and for documents that I might need to send a high quality image of.
I got a old school USB scanner off my dad, its better than the 3 in 1 printer i got for Christmas. it's biggest downside is I have to use a Windows XP machine to use it since that's its last supported os for drivers so it's also one of the many reasons why I have a dedicated XP machine for hardware and software.
Believe it or not people today actually just take pictures of documents and printed photos with their crappy phone camera, and the camera software on the phone will just do some basic perspective correction (if you do it correctly, I bet most people forget to do this). Blew my mind but apparently that's "good enough". 😐
@@s8wc3 I can do that. If I use a table, a tripod with a phone holder, good lighting, and something like Microsoft Lens (which does perspective correction and edge detection on pages). The Pixel 7 Pro camera should produce good results. Or, instead of setting up a complicated filming rig, I can put the paper on my flatbed scanner and with a button press have a high quality image. 🤣
Obviously you have to use what you have and what's on hand, but I try to use the best option I have rather than the worst.
@@Cyberdeamon depending on the scanner, you should see if vuescan has drivers for it, they have lots of drivers for old 32 bit scanners, both scsi and usb
I honestly didn't think I would be interested for almost an hr. But here I am, at the end of the video, hooked on every word 🤣
This is why this man is one of the best in vintage tech.
Wow! Thank you so much for this nostalgic view on the HP SJ4c! I used to demo these in shops, when I was sent out by HP as a so-called HP Ambassador, and I really liked this piece of hardware.
I really wanted one of these to play with, but the price tag was inhibitive for me.
Thanks again for giving this scanner a respectful and in-depth review!
Really nice scanner. I worked many times on an HP ScanJet III with an PowerMac and Windows when I was in university in the early to mid 90s. It truly was a great device!
Lol yep... I used one to scan in a parking permit at college and used the software to move the numbers around and the color printer to print it back out...
As long as you didn't park illegally, nobody cared because all they were doing was looking for the presence of the tag on the mirror, they didn't care what number it was! We made a bunch of money making passes... lol...
You truly deserve the Oscar for best VGA capturing! 🤓
I do a lot of scanning of and reading scanned documents at various archives and other research institutions (I am a Masters student). You can tell in some runs of archived douments were done on older flourecent bulbs, as their colours slowly shift as the series and run goes on. It's amazing. Cool to see the tech they probably were using to scan them (yeah, I'm one of the first GenZ/"Zoomers").
Most modern archive scanners are overhead ones (often Zeutschel Zeta's) but they're all LED based now. Most are also 600dpi, which is fine until you start trying to scan larger doucuments with them (the higher native dpi settings really help when scanning old broadsheets that are HUGE!).
Amazing video Shelby, as usual the longer ones pack the most interesting things.
Dude. How the hell did you get me to watch a nearly hour long video about a 30yo scanner. Kudos.
I supported HP ScanJet scanners 1997-1998, and I'm sure I have the drivers and software for multiple models... somewhere. Might be on a Zip100 disk, or 3.5" disk. Seeing that old triangular SCSI care gave me a big smile! I actually got ScanJet 5 discounted because it lacked a power cable -- which HP sent me for free.
Gosh, this really takes me back.
Congratulations!
PS: When you pointed out no buttons, I actually thought, "Well, no? Why would a scanner have buttons?" I had forgotten-- even my own ScanJet!
7:40 "Through the magic of obtaining -two- three of them...!"
I'm glad you switched over to TIFF from BMP. I work in the document digitization field and TIFF is the way to go for scans.
Really cool video :) That process of scanning was so advanced, splitting the light with a prism and all blew my mind. When I got my first scanner the IBM Flatbed scanner, it was so cool. My computer was completely isolated in it's own world. With that scanner I could scan things from the real world and get it into the computer. To me that was so amazing.
Splitting the light using prisms was what professional color TV cameras did from the time of invention. Some used four tubes R G B and Y (luma)
@@MrDuncl that's interesting... never knew that
Love the dedication to getting an old scanner to work. You are well on your way to having a deck of HP Scanjet SCSI controller cards. This is why I watch channels like this. I also remember using one of these back in the day, the design is quite memorable.
The scanner wars of HP, Epson, Canon, Microtek, and UMAX. My old High School had a ScanJet 4C in the computer lab in '96. My folks had a Microtek for their Mac. The HP was super dog-slow, but the scan quality was great for its day.
I longed for the "Linotype Hell" scanners like the "Saphir" or "Topaz" in the late 90s. They have a dynamic range that was well beyond the human visual capabilities and you can get them for really cheap now if you have the space 🙂
My father got a used "Apple Scanner" with 16 grayscale 300dpi. We used it extensively with his newly bought "Performa 475" from 1993 to 1997 until i got my own Computer.
I really like old HP documents. They have a full extensive writeup on exactly how one of their impedance analyzers works. It's amazing to me they made these thorough writeups on products they made, especially when some were in a very high price bracket and used some novel ideas or processing techniques.
When a company was spending more than the price of a house on a test instrument (like early HP Spectrum Analysers that used Vector Graphics) the least you would expect is some decent manuals.
This was also before China started stealing all the IP they could get their grubby little hands on... rarely is information like this made public anymore, regardless of patents in place or not.
My dad had one of these in the 90ies. Thanks for the memories❤️
I remember this one from my computer class back in school in the mid to end 90s. I absolutely adored it.
It must've been brand new back then. Wow! 🤯
Neat, this is the first flatbed scanner i ever used, in high school photography class in 1995. Was connected to a Mac IIci with Photoshop 3.0. I made my first web pages on it.
We had one in school by 1996, hooked up to a cutting edge 75Mhz Pentium. Had no idea how expensive it was, but HP provided stuff at a discount.
An old scsi scanner and linux saved my bacon many years back for a job I was doing. The sound of that HP working brings back memories of the days at the arts org. i worked at. Good video!
This was unexpectedly fascinating and I really appreciate you taking the time to detail this through.
I remember selling these scanners at future shop. Lots of returns and setup was not fun. When it worked people were really happy with it. We had many refurbs come back of that model.
This topic was right up my alley and I enjoyed it stop to start. One thing I had to learn about scanners, was that it is the sensor type and not the DPI that matter. The newer thin Canon you showed and even the enterprise Canon you showed at 47:11 have a CIS sensor (Contact Image Sensor as shown on the specs page at 47:11). But that HP uses a CCD (like a camera). While CIS can be thin and is fast, there is a difference in how the fine details are rendered. The Epson V600 is a modern CCD scanner that is cheap(ish) and has consistent results and uses a LED light source that doesn't fade over time. I scan at 800DPI for a balance of speed and accuracy. 1200DPI is really the tops I would recommend for documents/printed material. Anything over that is slow and bloated file sizes (easily over 400MB per image).
I used to own this model back in the day. The first time I used it, it blew my mind. You know what, it still does.
I've watched half a dozen of your videos now and--just subscribed. I've always loved The Computer Chronicles, LGR, and others, but you got something great here. I would just like that say thanks for this content, super informative and very enjoyable! :)
I worked for a school district as a computer tech during the time when these were brand new. I helped unbox and set a few of these up and it was always a pleasure to use them. I specifically remember that 16 bit card with the downwards angle too. Great scanners, we even had a transparency adaptor for it. Good to see one still out there and working!
I had a Scanjet back in the day, though a different model. Thanks for the memories!
I really appreciate the passion and dedication that went into making this video.
This is such a nice in-depth video! Great work!!
Thanks for the good story telling. You hooked me with the good story about the scanner and the journey you had to take to get it going again. I might even try one of my old scanners again.
Loved my HP ScanJet 4C. Was my first scanner, bought it during my 2nd year at graphic design college. At the same time I bought also my first external scsi zip drive (it was EPSON branded). Combined with Photoshop 4.0 and CorelDraw (can''t remember version) I started my affair with digital design. Still going strong :)
I had a SCSI HP Scanjet on my work machine in the late 90's. I was a web designer/developer (still am) before digital photography, so I used the HECK out of it for projects. It was insanely fast, and turned out great scans. The machine I had was an absolute SCSI beast. I had that scanner, a Sony floptical, SyQuest 44/88, Plextor 4x burner, and FOUR double-stacked 2GB RAID drive enclosures. on the SCSI2-UFUW daisy chain. At the time it was probably a 10,000 dollar or more setup. Dual Pentium Pro 200 with 4 gigs of ram, it was by far the most beastly computer I'd ever seen at the time, and I loved it so. Had a 21" Sony Trinitron 1600x1200 monitor and the SCSI controller was a PCI Adaptec SCSI2. Even the internal hard drive was SCSI, which made it a complete ripper.
I used this scanner in 2000, I absolutely loved it, it was very high quality built and fast. I loved the minimalistic design too.
You know how i know we're all complete fucking dorks? we all clicked on this and watched an almost hour long video about a fucking scanner from 1996. Enjoyed it too.
I feel old. But I feel happy to see all your vid's. Thank you for your work, it brings me some good memories.
Wow: had this box in my place for many months to scan in 1000's of pages of employee records as part of a intranet project for a Dutch company. It was part of my first project at my new employer and together we started offering internet/intranet projects to our customers. After this project I got hired by a regional cable TV networks company who wanted to start with cable -internet and assisted with the initial setup and did setup the first servers for email and home-page hosting and also designed the backbone for the Com21 systems... Stayed at that customer for 3years but never forget that 1st scanning and intranet project there .. changed my life up to today 👍👍
As someone who installed and worked with this scanner it breaks my heart a little to hear this described as retro but I appreciate your enthusiasm
Oh, I remember my first PARALLEL PORT image scanner. It cost a damn fortune to buy, and if you knocked it up to its highest resolution (plus 24 bit "True colour"), a sheet of A4 would take 5+ MINUTES to scan and transfer to the PC. I'd have friends see what my kit could do, then predictably ask if I'd scan and enlarge their 50ish holiday photos, then I'd have to explain that it would take several hours of my limited free time to do them, and run through at least £100 of ink jet cartridges.......... "Roughly how much did the local photo lab quote you?...... Oh, you haven't asked them yet?..... Hmmm.". :D
AAh, the memories! Just before launch, we had a lovely lady from Greeley, Colorado come out to explain this scanner to us. For some obscure reason, the launch was in the former Ansett bus terminal in Brisbane Australia. The floor was covered in carpet, but was not even. Despite that, it was a launch of a brand new product which was world-beating, and I loved being a part of that.
I've thrown one of these in landfill during covid lockdown whilst renovating my father's old office. It hadn't been used in years but was in the cupboard with reams of paper stacked on top.
Doh!
I had one of these back in the late '90s. I worked at a large company, and found it discarded. It was amazing the waste that place generated. I don't remember what SCSI card I used, but I do remember that I never had any issues. It just worked, and very well. Ultimately I rid of it years later due to it being SCSI, and not wanting to deal with that interface anymore moving forward. I do miss it sometimes. It was a giant behemoth of a thing, but was a pleasure to use.
a shocking trip down memory lane. in the early 90s, I used to have to do OCR on actual typewriter written manuscripts (with handwritten annotations and corrections) with a ScanJet II under DOS using OmniPage. ...and then proof-read and edit the whole mess before sending it on to DTP. what a time sink. but then again, still faster than just transcribing it in the first place
*edit* not to mention scanning and photoshopping several thousand product photos and schematics from a thousand+ page pneumatic modules manufacturer's product catalogue (they just had started expanding into the eastern European market that had just opened up, and they'd lost their original source materials). we then stitched it all together again in Ventura Publisher with Czech, Russian, Hungarian (and then some) translations
addendum, watching you trying to scan a whole page at 2400dpi: for that time, b/w drawings in "good" resolution to send to the print shop? 150dpi. greyscale pictures? 300. well good enough for standard A4/magazine/US letter printing. need higher res, maybe for a billboard? get someone with a rotary scanner to do the job. due to the amounts of data, such scan job and your XPress files would meet up at the printing plant and some professional would merge them there, then send you the litho films for each color layer to approve before issuing a pre-print
addendum #2: IDK which version of OmniPage you've got there, but theoretically it should be able to "scan" a B/W bitmap file. atleast the very early versions did, as there wasn't enough memory to both run the scanner and OCR software at the same time. tl,dr: scan full page, safe as bitmap (0/1), then run OCR on it
I never thought a video about a scanner could be so interesting. Thanks!
Thanks for all the hard work you put into this project. I really appreciate all the details you provide in the video.
I bought both of those games, brings back memories. Love this
As someone who had a Scanjet 5P this bring back happy scan noise memories, the SCSI HP scanners were just so much faster compared to the cheaper Parallel ones and compared to the other manufacturers of the time
Likley the one with the lamp staying on is failing to read the white reference strip at the underside of the scanner home position. Either the ccd itself has failed, its ribbon cable or the mainboard.
All of HP's industrial design from that era is gorgeous. Their Unix workstations in particular
Hi Shelby. I am also Shelby. Glad you finally got a working scanner!
I have an HP 3570c that I still use to these days, so that's 20odd years old, external PSU failed pretty early on.
Biggest plus of this scanner is the very accurate scanning and depth of scan. I can easily put anything on the flat bed and it'd scan hyperfocal from the flat bed plate.
Absolute peach to scan electronic boards and non easily foldable volumes.
I miss my old HP 4C, SCSI interface died on it, HP 5P I replaced it with never seemed as good on the colour accuracy, but as a bonus the 5P had the ode to joy Easter Egg demo which was pretty cool, SCSI card wise I used the Adaptec 2940 PCI cards on PC with win2k and xp and it also worked on my PowerMac 7200 on MacOS 8.6.
In the mid 90's. I worked at the Greeley, Colorado facility. R&D for the scanner division. We built the carriage lens and filter alignment robots. We had a way for the testers in the line to assure we had a 99% pass rate on the carriage to lens/filter alignment. They would manually pull on the carriage on the retest to assure the test would pass. So the vignetting you are getting is from HP's accepted quality control at it's finest. If you are lucky and out of the 3 units you have. one of those carriages may have legitimately have passed the QC test. You will find initials and the word pass written on the bottom of the carriage. If the word pass is written neatly then that is one that may have truly passed QC without issues.
OMG. I remember that. My first consulting gig was finding, installing, and teaching my client to use one of these.
Your passion is fantastic, great video!
27:30 that brings me back, exactly as I remember my old flatbed scanner used to do.
I had one of those back in 95. Had much of the same problems. Found out that it was not 2400 dpi and after a long process of frustration, took it back to Best Buy. I believe it was around $1000. Was disappointed by all the marketing fluff. Thanks for the great video. Was just what I needed to cheer me up after having a bad day. Best to you!
Small concern. You should test a scanner with a true analog photo, not a print, a print like a jewel case insert or a manual will be offset printed which is already ugly if magnified. Or just put something not printed in there like one of the ISA cards or whatever that has a flat face to see... you're adding interpolation to an already rasterized print. (EDIT: I was just about 20 minutes into the video, I see you addressed that later... good job :D)
Just chiming in to say that I too am still using the HP ScanJet 4C, attached to a PowerMac G4 using the Adaptec 2906 SCSI adapter (its Mac OS 9 drivers are, amazingly, still available on their site). The reason why the old HP ScanJet scanners have my preference is that they have great depth-of-field. I use it to scan calculators for my calculator museum website (it refers to this video now as well). And just like you, I love the sound these scanners make whilst scanning. It's so satisfying! And just like you I've got a small pile of them. A working HP ScanJet IIcx with transparency unit, a HP ScanJet 4P, a HP ScanJet 4C and a broken HP ScanJet 3C (its PSU died).
It would be cool to see this hooked up to a HP/UX workstation. Like a HP 9000 725/100 or something similar.
Interpolation is the scourge of digital imaging and while it may have some uses it shouldn't be allowed in marketing statements. I once saw a camera that was interpolated from about ~1000ish pixels wide to 4k. It was the stuff of nightmares. I refer to interpolated resolutions in **DPLIE** for this very reason.
The Big Metal Plate bit was great!
I have one of these scanners in my basement with other old equipment. I even have the transparency too for it (it was an add on lid that you could swap out and it would light up during a scan. Used it to scan hundreds of slides for a friend years ago.) It was an amazing working scanner when I used it last.
Love that case, I used it for all my friends and family builds back in the day, and still have at least two in my office ;-)
a fascinating seldom almost one hour long video about .... a scanner.
thank you.
I just finished scanning about 3000 developed photos from my grandma's house. Can say that having digital cameras is a blessing
i love your enthusiasm !
Nice nostalgic tech, thanks for the video 😊
Ah, that takes me back. So many vendors. I worked at a Mac-based DTP shop and we spent so much time testing and figuring out calibrations, and doing them regularly to fight color drift. The last shop I worked at actually got a Kodak Prophecy system and this high-end laser drum scanner for industrial quality. At the other extreme, I remember something called Thunderscan that you placed inside an Apple ImageWriter printer and it would make the print head move back and forth and the platen to advance so it would scan documents that way. Slow as hell, of course, and pretty low res and I think bw/grayscale only.
I recall someone, maybe Canon, making a printer where you could swap the pint head out for a scan head. Also the cheapo hand scanners and even motorised hand scanners which would drive themselves along in a plastic tray. At the turn of the century with cheap MFPs every charity shop was full of parallel port scanners. I paid more for a replacement PSU for a Mustek than the scanner itself.
How the heck did I just watch a 50 minute video without even noticing it was 50 minutes long... well done capturing my attention!
The smug face you're making on 34:43 is totally earned. You better bask in that glory man. What a monumental task getting that scanner up and running, then getting it running on modern hardware! Amazing!
We had a 4c in my elementary school computer lab. I loved using it.
I still have a 4C that I bought fresh from the factory in the 90's.
Effectively, it forced me to become a SCSI expert, (I always used it with Adaptec cards).
This machine gave me a good times and a good results in my graphics business.
I stopped using it mainly because of the large volume and space it takes up on any table. But I plan to take it out of storage and bring it back to life soon.
Thanks for this video-review. 👍👋
The 4c was the best scanner I ever had! If you had the 4c ADF it was awesome! With Paperport I was able to scan tons of documents and pictures! My scanner lasted me eleven years under heavy load. I miss my 4c.
Wow! I sold and installed a few of these back in the early 90's... The design software we were using them with cost $7,500AUD back then. How the times have changed... Great vid!
An advantage of the long optical path is greater depth of field for scanning objects like circuit boards. A few mm height difference makes little difference when the focal length is 50cm.
Yes! My current scanner is the CCD unit in my 2008-model Canon multifunction printer (a high end unit with film scanning capability, too). I have scanned PCBs before, and it’s so much better than CIS scanners. But it’s not as deep, both figuratively and literally, as the standalone scanners of the 90s.
Wow! this brings back memories! i had one of these way back when and ended up selling it for a USB Scanner years later... after watching your video I wish I had kept it. :P
Back in the day I was in charge of making digital documentation for the oil industry equipment we made. It was the first contract where digital documentation was required. A Hp 3C with document feeder and a Plex? cd burner with caddy were acquired for the project. I took months to scan our sub suppliers documentation and incorporate then into our own documentation with files from Autocad, Word, Excel etc.. Using Word button function to make links to chapters and figures took work.
I bought a Trust scanner a long time ago but at the time I just took it for granted and didn't think about how good it was 20 years ago. I found some scans recently and they are absolutely phenomenal, the detail and depth in them are outstanding. I'm going to check my loft to see if I still have it.
ahahahahaha that smile when you scanned to your linux machine. nice work sticking with it, man. keep rocking. love your videos.
This was my first flatbed scanner, glad you got it working, every scanner I've had ever since has felt cheap and nasty compared to this.
A typical florescent lamp is good for 20k hours. With 3 total lamps, scanning regularly, you''ll be set for decades. I don't think you should worry.
CCD scanners are also great for scanning populated PCBs. They can actually scan depth. Newer CIS scanners will only scan what's right up against the glass.
That's the reason why I bought my Fujitsu FI-7260. Modern but still CCD.
Thanks for the great video. Quite the adventure. I had a HP 5p and totally remember those software quirks.
I had one of these! It was a brilliant scanner! Today I use a 12-year old Epson with aftermarket drivers and software.
Is that really chromatic aberration that you are seeing in your high res scanner? I think it might be just an artifact of subsampling by non-integer factors, similar to the colors you get on subpixel rendering.
I think you are correct. Chromatic aberration is bit different.
My first scanner was an HP Scanjet 4C, bought for around $400 in the 1990s, which I connected to an existing SCSI card in the computer, I had that until I bought a CanoScan 8400F, which I'm still still using every day. The Scanjet 4C was still working perfectly when I gave it to a friend.
Could you pull a colour spectrum on that bulb when it's working correctly, then replace it with a tuned LED array that outputs something approximating that spectrum? (You'd need to diffuse the hell out of it, of course)