Upgraded Film Scanner Handles Bigger Formats At No Cost

Movie scanners are a practical software for digitizing slides and negatives, and the Plustek 8100 that [Christian Chapman] had was capable, but restricted to small structure movie only. Rather than shell out for a considerably more highly-priced medium format scanner that could cope with 120 film, he modified his 8100 to complete the similar detail with a blend of fantastic outdated computer software and components tampering.

On the software program side, [Christian] modified a driver for the Plustek 8100 so that it sweeps the scan head even more than regular. At the software level, to scan medium structure frames, it does a total of four scans: one particular for each individual quadrant. The success get stitched collectively in application with a thoughtfully-intended shell script that supplies previews and handles failures and restarts gracefully.

Components-intelligent, the scanning carriage requires modification to be certain very little interferes with the scan head as it moves even further than initially built. Some CAD and 3D printing produced small get the job done of this. Incidentally, this components mod is an superb demonstration of just one of the core strengths of 3D printing: the capability to make geometrically-clear-cut objects that would nonetheless be troublesome or impractical to assemble in any other way.