We completed a project to scan a large collection of 35mm slides for the MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA. These slides were copies of Harold Edgerton’s groundbreaking work in high speed and high-powered flash photography. Much of the original work was on medium and large format films. The University had these originals duplicated to 35mm slides some time ago. We scanned these slides for the Museum to use on the website and as “first versions” of the images for prints and licensing.

We all know Edgerton’s most famous work – milk splashing and balloons bursting. But this project gave us a look at the rest of his photography work – from utilitarian (e.g., night reconnoissance shots during WWII), academic (e.g., Schlieren photos of smoke and flame) and whimsical (e.g., fruit being destroyed by bullets).

Many of the scanned 35mm slide images are available on the Edgerton Collection website. It is well worth the time to look at some of this amazing work: Edgerton Collection

I think that this is a typical response to disruptive innovation. “It will only work for low-end applications.” “It’s too expensive.” “It doesn’t perform as well as my current XXX.” All true. All completely missing the point.

The second article in the print Spectrum, Zink: A Modern Fairy Tale,  (online title is “Zink: Inkless Printing With Colorless Color”) was a bit more even handed in its treatment of Zink and their product plans. It also gave a much more detailed view of how the technology works and what it takes to bring a technology to life after the death of the parent corporation.

The technology itself is very clever. Paper is permeated with three chemicals that are uncolored initially. However, when they are heated, the change colors to produce yellow, magenta, and cyan colors, respectively. The trick is that the chemicals change color at different temperatures and with different heating times. A very clever design in the print head and controlling electronics (along with these magic chemicals) applies the right temperatures for the right amount of time to get the colors to mix properly to form full color images. Interestingly, they don’t use a black chemical – analogous to the black inks in most ink jet printers. Perhaps they can produce satisfactory blacks by using the CMY colors. In an inkjet printer this may be too expensive (in terms of ink used) or produce poor results (too much ink required to do it precisely without bleed to adjacent pixels?). This is an amazing piece of research and engineering.

I haven’t seen any sample prints from these printers.

So… if Zink has their way there will be no more ink to buy for our printers. But you will need to buy this special (patented, and presumable not cheap) paper. Hmmm. I think that I would rather buy ink, even though it is a pain and it is expensive. At least I can choose my paper form, format, texture, etc. without needing to have support from a single paper manufacturer. And… I can use generic ink, even though it is a big pain a lot of the time. ]]> http://www.pixmonix.com/blog/polaroid-2-0-and-3-0-zink-printer-technologies/feed 0 http://www.pixmonix.com/blog/manipulated-celebrities http://www.pixmonix.com/blog/manipulated-celebrities#comments Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:02:00 +0000 sbennett http://www.pixmonix.com/frb/blog/?p=25 If you thought that you hadn’t had contact with manipulated digital images, direct from the world headquarters of looks above everything else, there is an LA Times article on retouching of photos of models and celebrities for publication. It is scary how easy this stuff is to do with the current software and services available to everyone for a pittance.

I love this magazine. I just wish that I had enough time to actually read the whole thing each month – and understand it all.

There are quite a few misconceptions that we see pop up very regularly regarding the technologies, economics and process of digitizing images. We collected a bunch of these together and put together a series of web pages describing these concepts and ideas.

Please see the folowing pages for descriptions of these myths about slide scanning, negative scanning and print scanning.

As always, I welcome your comments, suggestions and corrections to anything that I write here or that we have on the Pixmonix website.

We have added an extensive series of tutorials on digital imaging, as well as photo, slide and negative scanning technologies on our website.

I will focus my writing here on issues concerning photo scanning, slide scanning, and negative scanning, digital imaging, using digital images, and anything else I find interesting. Please let me know what you would like to see discussed.