The Forever Disk

Interesting product possibilities from Millenniata (http://www.millenniata.com/). They claim to have an optical disk (a DVD) that will last 1000 years and is backwards compatible with existing DVD readers. You need a new drive to create the disks, but you can use your existing drives to read them.

So... what happens when I no longer have a DVD drive? I guarantee you that I won't in 100 years - after the Singularity :-)

Flying, slide shows and restoration

It has been a while since I posted here. Summer has been busy with travel and family.

I had a very painful trip to the Midwest on United Airlines. I wish that it was possible for the airlines to simply go out of business and start again. I realize that this won't happen, but it is really what is needed to fix things so that travel is sane again.

On the Pixmonix front, we added a couple of new services during the last month. Like photo scanning, we have been offering these services "informally" for years. We now offer DVD slide show creation services and photo restoration services.

On the page about our photo restoration service, you can see some wonderful images that we restored for a book project. It was a real privilege to be involved in this work. The gentleman involved had some wonderful stories to tell and some great photos to show us of Afghanistan in the late 40's. Our customer provided text for the book. We helped on the project with scanning and photo restoration (some of it rather extensive), as well as book layout, proofing, and procurement. The final result is really wonderful. Thanks Charles!

Cheap scanner review

We have been seeing a lot of advertising for an inexpensive film scanner from Hammacher. It cost about $100. We were curious about how it worked, so we bought one and tested it out. You can see the results of our review of the VuPoint FS-C1-VP slide and negative scanner/converter here.

Short summary: this thing is not worth the packaging it ships in.

Photo Scanning

Pixmonix recently added a photo scanning service. We have done this work "informally" for years, but decided that we would formally launch and publicize it now.

Prior to formally launching this service, we investigated using a high-speed scanning system like those from Kodak. We were quite disappointed with the quality of the scans from these high speed scanners. The folks at Kodak really were no help in convincing us that they could do better and insisted that their scanners delivered comparable quality and met their quoted scanning resolution, even when we were holding evidence to the contrary. Quite disappointing... and another missed opportunity for Kodak. We have some samples from these high-speed scanners compared to those from our high end flatbed scanners on our website.

In short, the high speed scanners fell short for sharpness and color quality. They compared very poorly with the flatbed scans, even when we compared 600 PPI scans from the Kodak scanners with 300 PPI scans from our flatbeds.

We know that some of our competitors are using this technology to offer very low priced scans. Some are even proud of their use of these techniques - in part, I'm sure, because Kodak gives them some free advertising and high quality web links from the Kodak site. Buyer beware! Sometimes you do get what you pay for.

More robot reader: video

There is a video of one of these book reading robots on the Treventus website.

Cool news site

Here is a very cool news site with big photos. We are very much accustomed to seeing tiny images on the web. It is very refreshing to see large images as a focus of a news site.

The Singularity

The technological "singularity" is an imagined point in the future where our creations -- self-improving intelligence machines -- leads to unprecedentedly rapid technological progress. Some envision humans merging with machines in interesting or unknown ways.

IEEE spectrum this month has a series of articles on the "singularity". A reasonably nice spread of opinions on the subject from the obviously smitten to the hesitant. No outright rejectors... this is a technology magazine for technology people, after all. Ray Kurtzweil wrote a very popular book that is a good read. It will have you wanting to believe.

Artificial intelligence is an interesting field to watch. For decades, practitioners have been saying that nirvana is 10 years off. It still is. Only this time, it is 20-50 years off and it isn't as simple as a machine that can play chess, or translate languages. Instead, it is a self perpetuating, self-improving machine that in a flash improves well beyond human capabilities. "Singularity" sounds to me like the usual AI rubbish.

On the other hand... there is definitely some truth built into the arguments used by the advocates of the singularity. Hardware is improving (and has been for decades). We are putting rudimentary devices into our bodies (with stunning success in some limited circumstances). Things that were once dreams of AI are becoming standard fare in some places. Some have limited acceptance because they are only "almost" there -- think speech recognition used to replace people in corporate call centers. We have a computer that plays chess extremely well. So what? People want to believe that hard things are fundamentally human, but we come to realize that they are problems that can be addressed as computational problems. Hence this shows that the way that the human brain thinks is not the only way to solve problems -- Deep Blue is definitely different than Gary Kasparov. So maybe we don't need to understand the human brain well to build an "intelligent" being.

Complex software, on the other hand, isn't getting any easier to write -- in fact getting more difficult. For this reason, I think that we are a long ways from the singularity. Even with hardware capable of a huge amount of calculations, software still has to tell it what to do. And doing true, general purpose AI will require some tremendously complex programming.

I guess that I'm not a believer. I would like to be a believer. But I'm just not.

Speed Reader Robot, part 2

Here is a link to one such robotic system used for digitizing books: http://www.4digitalbooks.com/.

Speed reader robot

Interesting article about a book digitization project in the NY times.

I would like to see the robot that can turn the pages of the book that fast!

Manipulated Digital Image Detection

There is an interesting article in this month's Scientific American magazine. You can see the online version here. The article describes how forensic experts detect digital doctoring of images.

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

Scanning "Myths"

We get to speak with a lot of people as they consider scanning their photos and as they go through the scanning process.

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.

Tutorials on Scanning and Digital Imaging

It has been a very busy year since I established this blog. There have been a lot of developments in the photo and film scanning industries that I would like to address here as time permits. I will start by giving pointers to a few new resources that we have added to our website at www.pixmonix.com.

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