> It seems the Firewire ports on these things start to go bad after about a decade. If that happens you’re looking at a 3,000 Euro repair bill if you can find someone with the parts capable of replacing them. Hasselblad will still repair them but it’s a pain to get the scanner to them and they charge almost twice as much as third part service shops.
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> This thing is remarkable. The bigger brother (the X5) even more so. Imacon/Hasselblad had a load of patents on the technology that means no other manufacturer can replicate it. There are other high spec scanning solutions, of course, but none that come close to this form factor.
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> 15 years passed, at which point Hasselblad discontinued the scanners. The cost of modernising the interfaces was not worth it. In fact, only 7 years passed before Hasselblad effectively discontinued them as that was when they stopped updating the software.
This is the dark side of patents.
A company that has used the patent system to run everyone else out of business despite not being particularly innovative (the author describes a "simple" system for assuring the film is perfectly flat), refuses to keep their product line up-to-date or properly support it, charges a fortune for a service that from the sounds of it doesn't actually fix the problem with the interfaces, which may have been purposefully designed to fail anyway...and an entire market segment just dies.
It's sad that those $3000 bills for repair will probably be going to organizations like museums trying to preserve their collections or make them more accessible. Or be unaffordable to such organizations.
Yep, I deal with this all the time in industrial automation. It's even worse than the consumer space there, because the cost of breaking stuff is so high that the default is to invent something and then coast on your laurels for a few decades. Infrastructure and tooling that somebody's dad bought 30 years ago is now too expensive to update, so you keep it limping along well past its normal service life...
In particular, the author laments the high cost of scans:
> Here in Switzerland I am looking at a cost of around 30.- CHF a frame minimum if I get a third party to scan them for me.
And worries that you have to have something like the 2007 iMac to run it:
> So you need a dedicated old rig to run the proprietary software to drive the scanner.
But doesn't seem to quite connect 2 and 2 together: Those third party shops all have ancient dedicated rigs that they bought a decade or two ago. The use of that equipment is what your $30 per scan is buying! There are label printers and laser markers and time clocks and press brakes and CNCs and inventory management systems at shops all over the world, running some PLC RTOS from the 90s, or DOS or Windows 98 with PXI cards or printer parallel ports or even completely proprietary logic boards, that are decades old and you can't get parts or service or updates for them.
It's ubiquitous in any less profitable industries that aren't on the cutting edge.
It's hard to maintain and gradually update this equipment. I fear it's going to get harder as IIoT services die off and engineered lifetimes shrink. It's hard to debug a machine built before the Internet, with coffee-stained schematics and only enough IDE hard drive space for 8-character variable names, but I worry it will be harder still to debug a machine built well after the Internet with ubiquitous documentation available only behind a login to a server that's no longer online and enough hard drive space for gigabytes of third-party libraries...
I mentioned this in another comment, but sometimes people who are dealing with these systems just don't dive in far enough either. I was able to get my FlexTight scanner working on Windows 11 64-bit by modifying the INF for some existing 64-bit drivers. For some reason nobody had tried this before, or even just documented it. Even if there were no 64-bit drivers I've gotten it to work on a Windows 10 32-bit install.
Especially in the photo world there's so much tech being used, but not a lot of people that understand the implementation/engineering of it. Not faulting them, but I can't tell you how many people I know that just work off external drives. No NAS, no backups, just originals spread across fragile external hard drives. Hell, I knew some people that up until ~2011 still stored originals on ZIP disks and never managed to move them to something a bit more stable.
Going back and working on older Macs is an absolute pain. Now there's four separate architectures that may or may not have the right software/driver at varying levels of implementation. It's amazing how often the answer is "just use Windows". Not that it's perfect, but at least you weren't dumped like last week's spaghetti.
I dove in pretty far - to the point of running dtrace on the flexcolor software, and it seemed to get stuck in a thread that was receiving data from the scanner. The Firewire port is dying (well, now it seems to be dead) so this is not a software issue and more a "i'm not prepared to drop 5,000 Euro on something that may not be fixable".
They might have a patent on this particular setup, but the FlexTight system produces worse results compared to traditional drum scanning. Due to the way it uses a lens between the CCD sensor and the drum also means that you get some quality issues around the edges of larger frames. It also means you can't scan large formats like 8x10. It's cool tech and it is a shame that it's stuck behind patents, but it's not like there's not other options out there.
Also the hardware is funny. IIRC they didn't iterate on the actual components much, and the move to FireWire basically just integrated a SCSI->FireWire adapter into the case. I haven't seen the inside of an X1/X5, but I'd be interested if these could be repaired by using a different SCSI adapter of some type.
...
> This thing is remarkable. The bigger brother (the X5) even more so. Imacon/Hasselblad had a load of patents on the technology that means no other manufacturer can replicate it. There are other high spec scanning solutions, of course, but none that come close to this form factor.
...
> 15 years passed, at which point Hasselblad discontinued the scanners. The cost of modernising the interfaces was not worth it. In fact, only 7 years passed before Hasselblad effectively discontinued them as that was when they stopped updating the software.
This is the dark side of patents.
A company that has used the patent system to run everyone else out of business despite not being particularly innovative (the author describes a "simple" system for assuring the film is perfectly flat), refuses to keep their product line up-to-date or properly support it, charges a fortune for a service that from the sounds of it doesn't actually fix the problem with the interfaces, which may have been purposefully designed to fail anyway...and an entire market segment just dies.
It's sad that those $3000 bills for repair will probably be going to organizations like museums trying to preserve their collections or make them more accessible. Or be unaffordable to such organizations.