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Comment by yread | Hacker News Reader

I don't know anything about scanning film, but perhaps a microscope scanner could be used to do that? 8000ppi is nothing for those, there you're looking at ~10 pixels per micron (see https://cancer.digitalslidearchive.org/#!/CDSA/acc/TCGA-OR-A... ). If you can fix the film somehow to a pathology glass slide (75x26mm) you could load 100s in the machine and have it scanned overnight. It will be multiple GBs per slide though.

They do cost about 2x-20x as much but they are fairly ubiquitous in research hospitals or universities. Some (like Philips) also have annoying software so people are getting rid of them for cheap

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Some (like Philips)

What a shock. Wish I knew what internal culture/decision making process, lead Philips to such horrid everything software.

It's a teaching moment for others.

which is odd, as I've been playing with home LED lighting searching for non-Hue lights. not one of them and their accompanying software can hold a candle to what the Philips Hue app and control of the lights can do. Hue may be more expensive, but the hassle free and ease of use goes a long way.

So did Philips farm this one out?

The relatively smaller no. of people would put up with the quirks of speciality wonky software as long as it get the job done somehow, but the much larger no. of average consumers won't put up with a buggy software that fails to make the bulb do what they want. So better UI, better testing and so on.

Philips Hue is primarily farmed out to Signify, a company in the Netherlands. I'm unsure of the specific nature of the arrangement, though.

"The lamps are currently created and manufactured by Signify N.V., formerly the Philips Lighting division of Royal Philips N.V"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_Hue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signify_N.V.

That sounds very interesting, but where would you get the right software and drivers for the scanner?

Not familiar with Philips, but other microscope scanners I used, Aperio, Leica, Zeiss, all have dedicated computer attach to them, with special, sometimes strange looking interface card. They have precision stage, which holds glass slides, move under lens. USB is becoming common especially for transferring image. The software and driver is part of the scanner. Resolution of these scanner is quite high, but generally their lens (microscope objective) have very short work distance to the slide, usually less than 2mm, sometimes less than 1mm. So need to find a way to keep the film flat on the supporting glass slide while the distance between film and objective is still short. The output is limited to the vendor format. Most of the time is 8bits per RGB channel. An annoying character of the microscope scanners is their color is not accurate. One might get notable different color from the same slide with different scanner model. Therefor they may not suitable for scanning film.

Thank you for the thorough explanation! The low bit depth and the inconsistent color reproduction do sound like a deal breaker.

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