HR500 Scanner.com

Hi guys,

We have been running an HR500+ pretty self-sufficiently for a couple of years now, but now we are faced with a bit of an issue that we have as yet been unable to quite track down. We are getting artifacts in our scans. Some specifics:

The artifacts are horizontal lines, running the direction the film travels. They range in size from a pixel to a few pixels wide. They are most heavily concentrated on the leading edge of the negative (where the scan starts) and by the middle of the image they have faded off. Generally they are only visible in the sky or areas of uniform tone and no texture. They show up worse the higher the resolution of scan. Hi res scanning is tough to avoid seeing them, but they usually do not show up in low res scans. And the kicker, they only show up when ICE is used. Turn ICE off and the lines disappear.

We looked through our manual and the best suggestions it had were to clean the light bar and lens. Was skeptical as it seems to only show up with ICE and not during any scans with ICE off, but of course tried the old standby of cleaning both the light bar and lens and examining the bar for chips or scratches. The manual also walked us through creating a new defective pixel map, but that made no change. I did disassemble the light bar assembly and removed the ICE board and physically checked for dirt or other obstructions thinking something might be blocking the ICE scan in a similar manner to dust on the light bar creating lines in the visible optical scans. This seemed to have helped a bit, but did not solve the problem. We also swapped in a new ICE board to no effect.

My suspicion at this point is it is software and not hardware because the lines change, grow less frequent or more so depending on whether we scan a negative in the Strip Gate or with the single frame holders. Also, varying which mask is used to calibrate that channel has an effect on how heavily these lines show up.

Any suggestions as to directions to look would be appreciated. Thanks again.

Zeb Andrews
Blue Moon Camera and Machine

Alright, problem solved! Thank you immensely, Ray! For everyone's reference, our problem was attributed to a failing bulb. Our bulb was still bright enough that normal scanning and calibration were occurring just fine, but dim enough as to affect the IR array used for the operation of ICE. So every time we turned on ICE, we got partial lines across the frame. For further reference, we were using a Phillips brand long-life bulb that had been in there for at least several months of near every day constant scanning. The issue with the lines had begun showing up a month or two ago and getting progressively worse, which makes sense. Also, they originally only appeared at higher magnification settings and later at the lower settings, also making sense as the higher magnification settings disperse the light over a greater distance. Ray passed on that the machine was originally calibrated specifically for GE brand bulbs with the multi-faceted reflector dishes, whereas the Phillips has a smooth dish, and it is possible the two bulbs have slightly different spectral outputs, whether this was contributing to the problem or not, or if the bulb was simply burning slowly out, I can only guess. Either way, swapping in a fresh GE bulb cleared the problem up immediately. I love simple solutions.