I finally bothered to add a blog post update about the Kodak PCD filmscanner

Yeah this is way off forum, One of my other obsessions. Failed Kodak products. Surprisingly this is what lead me to this (watch photography) forum.

Namely the Kodak PCD film format. I took a bunch of photos back in the 1990s of my Visits to Swiss watch factories. At the time Apple was partnering with Kodak on the Photo CD system (Will last 100 years) I think it failed in 7.

I found a surplus scanner in 2020. Kodak did everything possible to erase this system from memory as it and the APS film format bankrupted the company.

When I went to Switzerland in 2022, I took the Kodak photo realists. I had also found a bunch of APS film cameras (a format I missed out on.) So I used these to take a bunch of photos when giving the lecture on player piano roll scanners.

Out of 8 billion people in this world I only ever heard back from 3! so this is a fairly esoteric topic.

I was going to post a blog entry in 2022, but never got around to doing it. At least until today. A few week back I helped a friend with some vintage computers (and got one of mine working.) which gave me more funds for 56x parts, which I am waiting for. So I decided to make a SCSI scanner cable from used pipe organ parts.

The results (and photographs) are here https://delectra.com/toys/?p=205 (yeah shameless plug.)

I think the only thing watch related was the stitching pony I made in the lower right. Eventually If I ever get the scanner working (and perhaps an automated APS film processor) I will be able to post non cell phone watch photographs.

Meanwhile here are a couple random selections from the open gate scans what messed up the automatic scene balance algorithm.

Output already looks pretty good.

Also, wow... I'd almost forgotten about Mac OS CodeWarrior.

Some people find these things best forgotten. So many tell me that APS (Advanced Photo Systems) forces painful memories. There was a lot of greed on the part of Kodak.

CW still sort of lives on. These days with things like Wx and QT most of the underlying GUI support is hidden. The powerplant classes are actually a nice piece of work.

A lot of this does feel like wasteful productivity. I can not stand Xcode for all the revisionism and deprecation. I wasted a lot of time getting stuff to work, only to have the library rug pulled out. Change for the sake of change is not really progress.

In a lot of ways this is not all that different than mechanical watch repair.