... in which disaster strikes.

I've had to hold my hands up and apologise from some pretty naff scanning on the last two days of last week. My fault was taking the quality of the scans we get from our s1220 for granted. Kodak has provided one of the most reliable pieces of technology it's been my pleasure to operate, so I was more than a little annoyed when things went wrong - not because they went awry, but because it was a client who noticed the glitches. I got an email drawing my attention to some faults in some of the scans from our photo scanning service. First, there was an obvious area of slightly darker blue appearing as a band across what should have been a smooth blue sky. Second, areas that should have been uniformly dark instead were mottled. Once the fault in the sky kicked in as you looked through the batch of images all you could see was this band, all else passed by your view, it was band after band. Laura stopped by and I told her what had happened. She asked if I remembered a slide scanning job we'd done for a friend of hers. That had been done on a Nikon scanner and marred with a similar fault. That resulted in a trip to Dr Nikon and a substantial bill for repairs. I quickly put the two together and expected a similar bill for repairs to the Kodak s1220. When I became aware of the problem I contacted Kodak Tech Support and emailed them a couple of sample scans. I spoke to their team the next day and got a diagnosis an hour or so later. Not for the first time I felt grateful to Kodak. Their suggestion was that the problem stemmed from incorrect feeding of the photos through the scanner, causing the print to pause slightly on its way through rather follow a uniform transit across the scanner glass. That made sense, a couple of scans had the nasty band at a slight angle (most at 90 degrees) so that would have been an image not fed in square, hesitating, the scanner seeing more blue than I'd like, and so the band appears. Attached to Kodak's reply was a pdf and a note of the page and item number that should be replaced. I spoke to Lisa at BMI (they supplied the scanner) and ordered a feed roller mechanism. It arrived at just after 10:00 next day. Five minutes later a few test scans proved the band had been banished (disbanded?). The dark areas were very much better, my pulse rate was back to normal. The new roller runs against another set of rubber feeders so I decided to replace those too. Another call to Lisa at BMI and yesterday that part set arrived. New rollers take just a few minutes to renew so I'm pleased to say we're back to top quality scans. Checking with the pdf covering the replacement parts for the Kodak s1220 it says the main feed roller assembly should be good for 500,000 feeds; the other set for 250,000. I can assure you we've done many, many more and I think photo paper is much tougher to handle than ordinary office paper. Remember, the s1220 started life as an office document scanner. I've made a mental note to replace the latest set of rollers in about six months time.

The End of the Road?

New year, like most of us a lot of time looking forward and some looking back. "Do you remember when?' sort of thing. One of those phrases bought me up with a start. Our Kodak s1220 is around four years old and despite that I still think of it as new. I hate to think how many images it has created for 1Scan, our photo scanning service. I'm pleased to say it is wearing well, still delivering stirling service. A few little quirks, just like any old friend, but overall a very happy working relationship. High volume photo scanning is firmly established as a major element of our product portfolio with no reason to think the next couple of years will be any different. We're ramping up the investment in our website and the Google Adwords campaign. So, do we soldier on with this scanner, with a performance profile developed five years ago, or move ahead with a new scanner? Whatever the route our leading scanner will have a Kodak badge. Nothing else has hit the market which will touch the Kodak range. As I see it we have three options. First, stick with the s1220. Second get a new version of this scanner. Third, get a new scanner with the upgraded spec offered by the improved version in the range. This box is faster, has a bigger / better hopper, has better software. Time for a bit of head scratching.