I’ve been considering taking on a project in this line for a while but haven’t had the need for it recently - I’ve got a Kodak Pakon, which is a bulk film scanner that drug stores used back in the days of 1 hour photo development. Unfortunately the driver is Windows XP only, and I’d really love to use it without running a VM.
I got mine on the second hand market from someone who got it from whichever drug store liquidated it - Walgreens, I think? - and yeah! It scans at 6MP, which is a little low by modern standards but meets all my requirements from film, and it has really excellent color reproduction. The real killer feature is that it can scan an entire roll of 35mm film without any interaction. You see them on ebay pretty frequently, there’s a couple different versions but the most common is the F135 that I have.
What this guy did, defines the term “hacker” for me. I think that ‘hackers’ are not primarily the guys who use exploits to break into someone else’s system (of course they can be skilled as well), but people who understand the device or system so well to be able to improve on it, extend it or fix it.
I picked up a VideoGhost for getting frames off systems without screen shot capability. It seems a similar idea except that it writes the frames to internal storage.
This is really cool! I actually have one of these Epiphan VGA-grabbers and it’s never quite worked perfectly for me to capture the weirdo 640x200 interlaced video coming out of a PC-88. Maybe now I can just patch it :)
I’ve been considering taking on a project in this line for a while but haven’t had the need for it recently - I’ve got a Kodak Pakon, which is a bulk film scanner that drug stores used back in the days of 1 hour photo development. Unfortunately the driver is Windows XP only, and I’d really love to use it without running a VM.
Can I ask where you got that device? Is the quality of the scans good?
I got mine on the second hand market from someone who got it from whichever drug store liquidated it - Walgreens, I think? - and yeah! It scans at 6MP, which is a little low by modern standards but meets all my requirements from film, and it has really excellent color reproduction. The real killer feature is that it can scan an entire roll of 35mm film without any interaction. You see them on ebay pretty frequently, there’s a couple different versions but the most common is the F135 that I have.
The lack of drivers is exactly what has kept me away from acquiring a Pakon, hoping someone will write a FOSS driver of some kind.
What this guy did, defines the term “hacker” for me. I think that ‘hackers’ are not primarily the guys who use exploits to break into someone else’s system (of course they can be skilled as well), but people who understand the device or system so well to be able to improve on it, extend it or fix it.
The grey banding and shear transform reminded me how strangely beautiful graphics bugs can be.
I picked up a VideoGhost for getting frames off systems without screen shot capability. It seems a similar idea except that it writes the frames to internal storage.
This is really cool! I actually have one of these Epiphan VGA-grabbers and it’s never quite worked perfectly for me to capture the weirdo 640x200 interlaced video coming out of a PC-88. Maybe now I can just patch it :)