Edit: Read also these blog posts of mine
Getting nice 16-bit scans from the Kodak Pakon
Kodak Pakon Updates
For a while I have been searching for a scanner that has a better workflow than the Plustek 8200. The Plustek is such a pain in the ass since it doesn’t do any type of batch scanning. At first I tried getting a Nikon Coolscan 5000 but failed 2 times on ebay. Scammers tried to scam me instead of send me a scanner. (No worries, I got my money back).
So then I decided to try the Pakon route instead. It is a famous scanner for people like me, so you probably know this scanner too. It came out in the early 2000s as a minilab scanner. The thing that makes it really nice is SPEED. It is fast like nothing else, at least if you’re compared to slow consumer scanners. But it is old, difficult to find in good condition, and needs Windows XP to run..
Of course I don’t have an XP machine just lying around, so I went with the virtual machine route. And boy was it a rough ride. I kept getting an error that just said 1003. Googling gave me very little results, something about sync being lost. After much digging around, it seems it is a problem with the data stream, which means that something is getting a hiccup when transferring bits from the scanner to the virtual machine. USB problem, cable problem, virtual machine problem, it could be any number of things.
For some reason, a lot of people have had good success with Virtualbox, but I did not. I tried with VMWare instead and now everything worked perfectly from the software side of things. Scanned a roll of C41 and boy is it fast. And colors were perfect out of the box.
Then I tried to scan a roll of BW, at first glance, not bad. At second glance, every frame has a dark stripe going through it. Goddamn it..
Well, I’ve seen this type of issues before. All scanners are pretty bad, no matter what you do. You can either have convenient and deal with issues like this, or have something super complicated to setup to get rid of possible dust/banding/quality issues.
Here is an example of the stripe.
If you look at it carefully, you can see that the line does not have hard edges. The softer the edges, the more “out of focus” the issue is. A very “in focus” banding issue is not good, because that probably means you have hot or dead pixels in your CCD sensor, and that can not be fixed. However, this one is very soft, so most likley it is something between the film and the sensor, on the other side of the focusing lens.
The Pakon is pretty easy to open, it has 4 screws beneath and you can lift the top off. If you attempt to do a cleaning routine like this yourself, be careful.. The enclosure with the motor can be lifted off with another set of 4 screws, but you have to be very precise when you put it back together. Otherwise you will fuck up the focusing.
Okey, so now everything is working.. all this took me probably around 10 hours to accomplish. This is not a scanner for somebody who does not know their way around a computer. Nor is it a scanner for somebody who shoots a few rolls of film every now and again. The interface is clunky as hell, but fast to work with once you get the hang of it.
What this scanner loves though is C41 color negatives. With ICE enabled you get dust and speck free negatives with perfect colors.
Here is a random selection of pictures I have scanned so far. No editing, straight from the scanning software.
Let me know if you have any questions, finding good information about Pakon scanners is difficult these days, there is a famous facebook group but they are not accepting any new members into it for some reason. Probably the admins just gave up on the entire group and now nobody is there to click accept..