The Imacon Flextight 949 is a superb scanner offering a dynamic range of 4.4 and excellent sharp results, for prints up to really large sizes. It really is optically sharp at each of its resolutions, has excellent shadow penetration, and in Fine Art print terms, scans made here on our Imacon have to date always been as good as, indeed almost always better, than any images we have seen drum scanned anywhere. This includes the same images compared side by side, printed over 60 inches in length (outputted on inkjets, and RGB printers like the Durst Lambda and the Kodak Pegasus).

Simply put, using this scanner we are able to offer the best ratio of quality to price available from any scanning service in this country.

The Imacon Flextight 949 was the last Imacon branded scanner to be released before the merger of Imacon and Hasselblad, and is significantly better than even previous Imacon scanners - in terms of shadow penetration, sharpness and low noise, it is one of the best scanners on the planet and easily competes with any other scanner available. The technology in the 949 is actually as good as, if not better than, the now re-branded Hasselblad X5 machines.

Imacon Flextight 949 versus the Drum Scanners

Pretty much every major landscape photographer in the country now scans on Imacon machines.

Landscape photographers (whether you like their work or not), are as picky on print quality as anyone. The production benefits of the Imacons, and the superb quality results, are hard to argue against. While technically some drum scanners offer better specs on paper, the reality is that very few people seem to be able to achieve optimum results with these machines in actual practice, and because your images must be oil mounted, there are many disadvantages to the process (not least of which is cost - our most expensive scans are sub $40...drums scans of a similar size and quality can not be had for less than $200!).

The Imacon Flextight has been described by some as a drum or 'virtual drum' scanner. People with 'real drum' scanners sometimes get upset by this. Which is quite silly - the Imacon IS a drum scanner in that the film is bent over a curved surface to result in scans with perfect edge to edge focus - exactly the same as a Howtek, Tango or whatever. What they really mean is that the sensor in the Imacon is not PMT, but CCD. Does this matter? Real world tests indicate it does not. Yes, CCDs are inherently slightly more noisy than PMTs but in practice the very high quality CCD inside the Imacon produces results which, in print terms, stand up to anything we have ever seen scanned in Australia. Try us and you'll see!

If you're looking for superb quality scans, the Imacon Flextight 949 will deliver.

Imacon versus the Flatbeds like Epson 2450, 4870, 4990, V700 etc.

We had an Epson 4870 sitting here on our desk, and used it occasionally to scan film larger than 4 by 5 inches. For the money, it isn't bad, but next to a scanner like the Imacon Flextight 949, it's a toy. It defeats the whole purpose of shooting the bigger formats - 6cm by 6cm film scanned on the Epson is noticeably worse than 35mm scanned on even the Nikon scanner, when viewed as only an A4 sized print!

Ask yourself why do you shoot medium or large format? To get truly fine prints, the whole chain must be right - from good technique during image creation and capture, through good processing, to good scanning, and on to good digital file processing and final output. If you're going to stick a thoroughly amateur device like a flatbed scanner in the middle of this process, you're going to have to expect thoroughly amateur results. The Epson simply isn't sharp, suffers from colour banding issues due to its cheap sensor, and offers poor shadow penetration. All of which are quite visible in prints.

If you're doing small prints from scans made with a flatbed, you may find the results 'sharp enough'. But sharpness is only one issue - what you might not immediately notice is the tonal compression that results from the flatbeds cheap sensor. This results in images that lack three dimensionality. It's less immediately obvious than the sharpness issues the flatbed's have, but possibly an even bigger problem