Dear Mark,

Thanks for your reply. Your receipt shows that your device was purchased over a year ago. Your GO 720 comes with a one year warranty. Your device is out of warranty and we do not have out of warranty repairs available. We are deeply sorry for any frustration this has caused you.

Best Regards,

[Name Redacted]
TomTom Customer Support

No out of warranty repairs at all? I can’t give you any money? It’s just, after a year, “sorey aboot yer brick, sucks to be you”?

Feh.

I’ve gone through several phases of trying to find the “perfect” way to scan and archive the photos, even getting an amazing slide & negative scanner that, while producing really incredible scans, unfortunately ended up being so damn slow that I hardly used it due to the time commitment. Sure, this whole thing is one enormous time commitment, but when you have to babysit a scanner that can only do four frames at a time, it gets really tedious, really quickly.

So, recently I’ve gotten back on the trail of the best solution; this time, “best” being defined as “the solution that actually gets me to scan all of these images in a relatively short period of time, provides very good image quality (if not “perfect”), and allows me to get the images up somewhere on the web that people can actually look at them and comment before critical key members of the family are no longer able to do so.”

So, I settled on an Epson Perfection V700 Photo as the scanner, as it got a lot of good reviews, and seemed to have the best speed-to-quality ratio for the image types I needed to scan.

As for the web option, the best seemed to be, in the end, a new Flickr account that is set to default for sharing only with family, so that we could maintain privacy of those family members still living, and also for their photo note functionality, where you can draw a rectangle on the photo itself— say, around the head of a person— and make a note right there as to who the people are. Infinitely useful in identifying people in photographs when the usual “left to right” style of notation can get really confusing.

This all seemed to be working really well, up to the point that I realized that a vast chunk of the negatives and slides that I have in the collection are not of the usual 35mm and medium format sizes that Epson provides holders for along with the V700.

The first I encountered is that a great amount of my childhood is contained within the once-popular 110 cartridge film format, a tiny 13x17mm negative (on 16mm film) that does not hold a great deal of information. But it’s my childhood, damnit— so I had to find a way. After trying a few simple solutions with placing the film directly on the scanner glass and flattening it with a glass plate (a horrible experiment that resulted in Newton rings appearing in my scans), I googled for further solutions.

Finding several discussions on photo.net, the first option I tried was an adapter that would fit into the Epson’s medium-format holder. Several people raved about it, but what I received was a cheap polystyrene holder, sloppily assembled in three layers with double-sided tape, that I had paid entirely way too much for. I’m not even going to link to the item in question, as I want to give them as little promotion as possible. Sure, it worked, but it was so poorly designed from a workflow standpoint, it seemed like a complete rip-off.

I had a similar experience with 127 negatives, though I had not yet tried any sort of holder adapter.

Just recently, I have dug further into the collection to see what other formats I may be encountering, and discovered my Grampa— who was an avid slide photographer— took a much greater percentage of slides than I suspected in the 127 “super slide” format, which fills up almost the entire 2” square slide format, with only a 5mm border of frame around the edges. However, the slide adapter that came with the V700 was designed only for 35mm film slides, and thus the cutout area in the center of the slide holder is in the shape of a very thick cross, so that either the horizontal or vertical format will show through. Hollowing out this holder to allow the full 127 frame to show through does not seem to be an option, as the way the injection-molded holder was designed (already quite flimsy) would be made even more flimsy by filing it down, to the point of probable breakage.

So, I have embarked on a new venture— one I’ve never done before, but have often dreamed of: Industrial design. Now, I don’t fancy myself an industrial designer just because I’m suddenly designing real, physical products; however, I do hope that I can contribute something useful in this small area of film holders for the V700, not only for myself, but perhaps for others with similar needs.

So, in the works right now are three items: a full-blown 12-slide holder that is designed to hold 127 format “super slides” without cropping; a redesigned 110 filmstrip adapter that will fit instead into the 35mm filmstrip holder for the V700, allowing longer strips, and more of them per scan; and a 127 filmstrip adapter that will fit inside the V700’s medium-format holder. These are currently planned to be laser-cut from Ponoko.

The two smaller adapters are designed similarly to the overpriced holder I purchased, but the two outer layers will be black acrylic, for greater tensile strength and more precision in size and shape, and the layers will be bonded together with a welding adhesive which will also provide greater strength. I am aiming to make sure that this adhesive will not adversely affect the film stocks, and reduce the possibility that it will come in contact with any film in the first place. If you have any suggestions in this regard, I’d love to hear them in the comments below.

I also hope, in the eventuality that I may make these holders available for sale, should the demand be there, that I can manufacture them less expensively and with higher quality than the rip-off adapter I purchased. I suppose eventually, after so many times of saying “There’s got to be a better way,” that you just need to sit down and make the better way yourself.

If you have any experience dealing with family archive scanning, or any of the issues I described above, I’d love to hear your comments.

Now if I could only find the jingle for McKay’s Food Store in Southern Maryland.

Just a couple of weeks ago, however, I ordered this replacement Nikon BM-5 LCD cover for my old D70s, since the old one had gotten cracked at some point. Sure, ten bucks is probably a bit much for a little piece of plastic, but that’s just the way things go with some Nikon accessories. The seller was lasted as “CAMSDIGITAL”, whom I’d never heard of before, but didn’t really think anything of it.

When the BM-5 finally arrived, it wasn’t a real Nikon BM-5, but a cheap knockoff made of brittle plastic, with a different pebbled finish to the plastic (the Nikon has a matte “etched” finish), the label “for NiKon” [weird capitalization theirs], and the clear area through which you view the LCD was distorted and warps everything viewed through it.

I complained to the seller through Amazon and asked for a refund — as if I had known this was a cheap knockoff, I certainly wouldn’t have paid ten bucks for it. The seller responded that they would check it out and get back to me the next day. But as the next day passed without a reply, I wrote again, this time with no response at all. Eventually, I contacted Amazon and submitted a claim under their A-Z Guarantee, so they would step in and sort this out.

A week later, there is no resolution from Amazon yet (I wasn’t expecting one for another week), but in the mail last night I receive a similar padded envelope containing a real Nikon BM-5 with the original packaging, protective plastic film on the viewing area and everything. The weird thing is, this package was from Adorama. Looking on Amazon’s site, Adorama is now listed as the seller of this item, and not CAMSDIGITAL. So, what’s going on here? Are they the same company? (I doubt it — the CAMSDIGITAL order shipped from Amherst, MA, but Adorama shipped from Elizabeth, NJ). Is one company making up for the failings of another?

Best guess at this point is maybe the A-Z Guarantee staff is now hounding Adorama to fix the order since they are now the “seller”, even though they weren’t when I originally ordered it. I’ve got another email in to alert them to what’s going on. I’m glad I finally got the real BM-5 I ordered, but I hope I didn’t somehow get the wrong people in trouble.

The notations in parentheses indicate what the format is capable of, not necessarily the most common usage.

For production:

1. Cineon, EXR, TIFF (still image files, one per frame, as high resolution as needed)
2. IMAX Film
3. 70mm Film (which is hard to say is in “common usage” anymore)
4. 35mm Film (at least 2K resolution, possibly 4K, depending on the stock)
5. D5 (4:4:4 2048x1080, ~300 Mbit/s)
6. HDCAM SR (4:2:2 or 4:4:4 1920x1080, 440 or 880 Mbit/s)
7. HDCAM (3:1:1 1440x1080 144 Mbit/s)
8. DVCPRO HD (4:2:2 1440x1080, 100 Mbit/s)
9. HDV (1440x1080 MPEG-2 25 Mbit/s)
10. AVCHD (1920x1080 H.264 up to 24 Mbit/s)

For distribution:

1. Blu-ray (1920x1080 H.264 or SMPTE VC-1, up to 40 Mbit/s)
2. Sony PS3 HD rental (1080p, compression and data rate unknown)
3. tv/iTunes HD rental (1280x720, H.264, data rate unknown)
4. Netflix on Sony PS3 (1080p, compression and data rate unknown) via
5. Netflix on XBOX 360 (720p, compression and data rate unknown) via
6. Netflix on Roku (some HD, but I haven’t dug up any details so far)

Obviously, I need to do some more research into the delivery methods. And perhaps this should become a handy-dandy table.

hey, it’s been a couple of years since you upgraded your favorite composing software, Reason. Why don’t you get that up to speed and working on the latest OS and see where that leads?

So, I did, and now I’m in the “read up about everything possible in this area, but don’t actually accomplish anything yet” phase of my quest, focusing on experimenting with the 8-bit chiptunes sound. If you’re not familiar with the “chiptunes” sound, might I recommend a few sites:

• 8bit FM
• 8bitpeoples — I especially love the work here by trash80.
• Reformat the Planet, a documentary about the chiptunes movement, which came out of the…
• Blip Festival, a 3-day festival in New York devoted to chiptunes.
• True Chip Till Death, a blog which follows the chiptunes scene.

To that end, here’s a few links for those of a similar bent:

Fake-n-Bake Chiptunes in Reason — A three-part series on YouTube from Judson “Tettix” Cowan that shows how to get an 8-bit-like sound from Reason, which isn’t quite capable of limiting itself to a real vintage 8-bit sound, but you know what— I’m not sure that’s what I want anyway. Making myself a slave to the limitations of the vintage hardware isn’t what I’m looking to do. There’s no harm in taking that 8-bit baseline as a jumping-off point for further experimentation.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

For those who would rather limit themselves to vintage hardware (or reasonable facsimiles thereof), here are a few other options:

• MIDINES turns your NES console into a MIDI-controllable “rackmount” synth.
• Little Sound DJ runs on GameBoy and GBC with a sequencer/synth interface. The cartridges are no longer being made, but you can buy the ROM and load it onto a homebrew backup cartridge, or run it in an emulator.
• Nanoloop is a synthesizer / sequencer cartridge for Game Boy consoles, including a 2nd version that now runs with the more modern GBA cartridges.
• KORG DS-10 turns a Nintendo DS into an emulated Korg MS-10 synth, complete with patch cables. I plan to play around with this one as well.

Therefore to that end, we enter into the following articles of agreement:

I. We pledge ourselves to be bound together as brothers, in a life and death friendship; sharing alike in fortune and in trouble.

II. All monies and valuables which may come into our possession shall be lumped together into a common fund; and from this fund shall first be taken the money to fit, rig and provision the ship. After that, the recompense each will receive who is wounded as follows: For the loss of a right arm, six hundred pieces of eight; left arm, five hundred; for the loss of a right leg, five hundred; left leg, four hundred.

If a man conceal any treasure captured, or fail to place it in the general fund, he shall be marooned; set ashore on a deserted isle and there left with a bottle of water, a loaf of bread, and a pistol with one load.

If a man shall be drunk on duty, he shall receive the same fate.

And if a man shall molest a woman captive against her will, he too shall receive the same punishment.

These articles ended and due this twentieth day of June in the year sixteen hundred and eighty-seven.

…quoted from Captain Blood (1935)

In addition to the flickr version embedded above, a QuickTime version is available, playable both on the desktop and on iPhones. It has also been posted to YouTube. Please feel free to share it far and wide.

Enormous thanks to the entire cast and crew:

• Mark Boszko: Writer, Director, Co-Producer, Director of Photography, Grip, Background Actor (“Man Standing Agape”, “Foil Man”), Editor, VFX Artist, Colorist
• Doug Koztoski: Co-writer, Co-Producer, 2nd Unit DoP, Grip, Background Actor (“Running Man #1, #3 & #4”, “Director”)
• Sarah Thomason: Actor (“Amazon Woman”), Grip
• Carlos Hip: Cantonese Translator, Actor (“Executive Producer”), Grip
• Marivic Tagala: Actor (“EP’s Assistant”)
• Jose Vazquez: Background Actor (“Boom Operator’), Boom Operator, Grip, VFX Assistant
• Rob Rhyne: Background Actor (“Actor with Kindle”), Grip
• David Brown: Background Actor (“Running Man #2”)

Thanks also to Tom Schmidt for his VFX critiques, and to Buzz Andersen for his “Buzzhelm Scream” which we used for the man running from his car.