I’ve been doing R&D in this type of stuff for a long time, although most of it is on the print-side and not the scanning side.
Needless to say, a group of fellow printmakers and myself had a little blog for a while called “The Agnostic Print” where we talked about best techniques etc.
I wrote a little article about camera scanning back then (13 years ago!) titled “The Future of Scanning” which consistently got 10 to 20 times more hits than the rest of all the articles combined.
Here’s the wayback link:
I’m glad to say that with NLP and high end medium formats these days, the future is here.
Well a 50x60 inch print would need a sensor of 15’000 x 18’000 pixels if you want to print with 300ppi. That’s still 270 megapixels or about 68 megapixels, if you allow yourself two times digital enlargement.
Go ahead and get a 100 megapixel Fuji GFX camera and you’re there…and then you need a decent lens too, specially if you want to zoom in to 1:1…plus some extension rings if necessary. All of it should be possible within a budget of 10’000.-
I’m building a relatively low cost rig that should be able to deliver stability for the weight.
Check it out here:
A very interesting ‘industry’ perspective, you were right on the money with your predictions from 13 years ago. Back in the early 2000s I was working at a photo library where they had a Fuji Lanovia C550 to scan all their film originals, a fantastic machine, another library we dealt with were doing the same with an Eversmart Supreme, also excellent for that type of work. However the Lanovia went off on the back of a lorry eventually as there wasn’t anyone that could repair it economically, and most everything that needed to be scanned had been scanned by then anyway.
Moving forward 13 years I was thinking about a hypothetical institution that might have ‘camera scanned’ their archive 10 years ago using a 20MP DSLR, I wondered if they might now be mulling over the possibility of scanning it again using the latest medium format backs. Has the ‘camera scanning’ technology finally matured to the extent that all formats can be easilly catered for with the aid of medium format backs and pixel-shift. Has high resolution pixel-shift proved to be the answer that people were hoping for when it comes to archiving for institutions?