The ad on Craigslist read, “Howtek - Scan Master 4500 - FREE,” which of course had to be a mistake or a scam, since high end drum scanners cost a fortune. I looked it up. The Howtek, when new in 1994, cost $25,000. Getting one for “FREE” seemed unlikely.

I called the guy and he assured me that the scanner worked, and he was giving it away to anyone who could use it. Since I don’t shoot large format nor do I regularly make huge prints, drum scanning would be overkill. Right? Whatever, I went and picked up the scanner along with 2 drums, spare lamps, and the PowerMac 9500 running MacOS 8.1 and Photoshop 4.0 used to run the scanner.

After farting around with video and SCSI (remember those?) cables for a couple of evenings, I finally got everything working. I don’t have a mounting station or other accessories needed to do a proper wet scan, so I just taped a strip of 6x6 negatives to the drum. Certainly not ideal, but it got me started.

The only thing left is to network the 9500 so I can actually pull a finished scan off it to look at closely on a decent monitor. Even on the crappy monitor attached to the 9500, it looks like the scanner is pulling in a ton of detail. Maybe it’s time to think about making some really big prints from the ginormous files this thing produces. At any rate, it’s a lot of fun to play with, especially considering the only thing I’ve spent on the project so far is time.