Aldi Tevion Scanner

The scanner was cheap and all expense has been spared in the manufacture. This is the same as the Veho, Ion, Optex 5mp scanner without LCD preview. Due to poor tolerances and lack of adjustments the image was off centre, so there was a fat border at the bottom of an image and a thin one at the side. So it was time to do a bit of surgery.
Here is the brute.

From blogpics

Pull off the rubber feet and extract the two screws.

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Lever off the top and gently unhook the four latches that retain it. Two more screws are revealed.

From blogpics

The cover removed, you can see the snapshot button in the top and wires going down to the back light illumination panel.

From blogpics

Looking inside we see the camera. It is held on by two screws and there is no adjustment possible.

From blogpics

The camera looks down at the slide and you can see a Gloucester docks shot out of focus.

From blogpics

Camera alignment was corrected through the use of a custom made polymer spring, precision made out of a memory card case. Pictures no longer have two black edges.

From blogpics

And if you are in any doubt about the quality of this scanner just look at the underside of the snapshot switch. Several layers of double sided strips topped with a paper adhesive tape. This presumably fattens up the button so that it can reach the snapshot switch. As we say, "Quality with a capital K".

From blogpics

Building the Severn Bridge

The scanning of the Peter and John Coleman archive continues just to see what we have.

Box G2 of the archives shows how the decks of the Severn and the Wye Bridges were assembled. It also shows a railway viaduct being disassembled and the Severn Railway crossing a few years before it was finally removed.The pictures are HERE

The Coleman slides

I've been picking out the more interesting pictures from box S7. These are road and pub signs from the 70s.

This is the Greyhound pub some time in the 1970s.

From BoxS7

And this is what it looks like today.

From 2009_03_27Greyhound

The Chianti bottle has gone and the dog has descended about eight inches. The Labore Et Honore emblem has been repainted although Work and Honour is the last thing that is on the mind of the modern day customers. Only a rusty iron rod remains of the ornate ironwork holding the pub sign board and the chimney has been much shortened.

Other scans from box S7 here...
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/peterk.vt80/BoxS7#
They are from the Tevion 5mp scanner which is why the quality is poor.

Aldi Slide Scanner

OK, I now have one Tevion/Ion/Optex 35mm slide scanner. Tammy got the Aldi store manager to reserve her one last night and so she managed to pick one up this morning. Was it worth the effort?

No, not really. The software is really poorly constructed and the installation is not as simple as it should be. In actual use it is a bit clunky but we could forgive all of that if it worked. On Vista the bundled software first does a calibrate. Why it does this is not clear because it then proceeds to take a simply dreadful image. Far too dark and with a blue cast although the software works better on Windows XP. It also crops a lot of a 35mm image and again there is nothing that you can do. Using Photoshop to import the image the colours were much better and acceptable for a £40 scanner. These images are all unretouched.

From slidescans

It is also annoying that there is absolutely no manual control over the capture process. It should be possible to adjust the settings to get the scan optimised for how you want it but instead you get what it thinks is best. It spends the next 20 seconds ramping up the exposure to something reasonable. Everything looked OK but zooming into the bright areas revealed a sinister flaw. High contrast edges are so poorly handled that they get edged in cyan or green as you can see in this detail.

From slidescans

For the technical among you who know your Fourier, an edge introduces high frequency artefacts which should be clamped but in this case are allowed to ring out of band. This results in cyan splodges where there should be black. Unforgivable even for a cheap scanner. So an interesting device with potential let down by shabby firmware.

The last bad mark against the scanner is the limited dynamic range. If the image has too much contrast then any dark or light detail is lost so don't expect those lovely wispy clouds to show up.

The resolution is good if you get the exposure right but you have to hack it and this is how. If you take the slide out and let the camera gaze at the white light the exposure ramps down. Then you put the slide back and it slowly adjusts to the dark. You time it just right to take the picture when it gets to the exposure that you want and then you can see the detail like the shop sign that says "Gloucester Flooring Supplies"

From slidescans

This image of Victoria Basin was taken by Stonehouse Wheelers member John or Peter Coleman probably in the 1980s. The boats in the foreground are called Glevum and Severn Trader. Interestingly it is the same boat and viewpoint in Alan O Watkin's image
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Another bad point I discovered later. The OVT scanner software often makes a process called System use all the CPU. The only way to be able to keep using Photoshop is to increase the task priority to high. Then of course all my other processes will stop working. The software is truly dreadful and makes a poor product even worse.

Aldi film scanner

In this era of the credit crunch it is always worth keeping an eye on Aldi. And the latest bargain is a film scanner for £40. Great! Just what you need for transferring those old slides and negatives. Or is it?

I'm thinking about other bargains like the coffee grinder. It grinds coffee just fine. Only trouble is the design means that sometimes it doesn't stop grinding. The safety interlock gets coffee dust into it then it stays switched on. And you can open the lid and the blade doesn't stop. That is one major design flaw but if you know about it you can just use common sense and not shred your fingers.

This scanner is a rebadged Optex unit. It is in effect a macro camera with three white LEDs illuminating a screen. It is the same as but less fuss than a cheap compact camera with an illuminated screen. It will have to do until I can afford a Nikon Coolscan and on the bright side, it is less likely to start shredding fingers.

The Wild West (Country)

Hot on the heels of a kitten shot with an air rifle and a cat shot with a crossbow, and a greyhound with its ears cut off as reported on BBC News, here in Rodborough we have our own problems and below is a letter from Gordon Smith. If you know who these idiots might be then we would all appreciate it if you could report them and get them stopped.
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"On 2/3/2009 I was riding my bike (Marin) up Rodborough Hill (between the Dark Lane and Mount Vernon turnings) at about 12.15 when a (dirty) light silver Peugeot hatchback sat on my tail for a few moments, then accelerated past me. As it came alongside I heard the distinctive sound of a BB gun being fired ! The pellet passed between my legs and struck the bike frame, split in two, one piece ricocheted off my glasses, the other bit hit me on the inside of my right thigh. OUCH !
I gasped in pain and shock - shouted some expletive etc and the car sped off up the hill, the occupants (3 maybe 4 'youths', at least one was female) roaring with laughter.
I didn't managed to get the reg' but reported it to the local police when I got home. Without the reg' there isn't much they can do...but I am receiving regular call from the Victims of Crime Support Unit.

And on that jolly note I wish you happy cycling and roll on warm sunny days!"

Stroud is Great!

I do like Stroud, really. My previous posts running down Stroud don't extol the virtues enough. Like the new Stroud and Swindon premises in King Street in the former Green Dragon Pub. It is all very smart and converted to a very high standard. The lower part has been refaced with stone that blends perfectly with the Cotswold stone. The glass door automatically slides when you walk past it. The interior is much smarter and more welcoming. There are energy efficient LED light bars on the exterior signs. And they managed to fit this into 8 metres of shop frontage where the old place took up 13 metres. 13 metres was just too much space and they could only fill it with big ugly posters. Who needs all that space! And even better news. A year ago about 2% interest on my money was going to the Government. Now they have managed to reduce that to a small fraction of a percent. One in the eye for you, Gordon Brown!

Next trip to Germany

We didn't have enough time to visit many things on our whirlwind trip of Germany last summer. I didn't miss not going to the Porsche/Mercedes/BMW/Audi museums. But the next trip to Germany we will definitely have to plan a day out at this place:
Nationalen Strickjacken Museum

Out of the Cheap came Forth the Weakness.

"Out of the strong came forth the sweetness" is Samson's riddle from Judges 14:14. The answer refers to bees making a meal out of a lion carcass. Unfortunately as we all know, bees make honey from flower nectar and not from carrion. What the "bees" were are more likely to be a fly laying eggs. These harmless flies take on the disguise of a bee to avoid getting eaten by birds.

I was reminded of this because of a Shrove Tuesday visit to Aldi where we were lured by the promise of maple syrup. The previous year we bought a whole case of these at £2 a bottle. It is between £3 and £4 in Stroud so this was a very good buy. It was also top quality 100% maple syrup and very excellent. It lasted us about 9 months.

So come pancake day it was time to replenish the stock. This time what they had were some bottles with tempting names like Maple Praline and Roast Maple made by Blackberry Patch

The presentation is perfect, a lovely bottle with a little glass loop for a handle and a great colour proclaiming "Blackberry Fields". What it turned out to be was flavoured and coloured glucose syrup. The taste is weak and unpleasant. The texture is slimy. I'm not fussy about food but I think that these will end up being poured down the drain. What is more shameful is that these came from Georgia, the heart of Pecan county where they ought to know better.