THey made a rare SCSI flatbed with no glass for up a3 scanning that was quite amazing. Only problem it is SCSI only. If you're on a MAC get a SCSI cable from Granite Digital (www.granitedigital.com) The card if you are on a intel machine is about $300 + bucks.
There was just one on eBay about a month ago. This unit sells for about 4 to 5k, but is worth a lot more. A lot of the poeple who sell it are banks that repo leased equipment and they don't know what they have. But for the money there is no better scanner especially if you need 8x10. [a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=84051\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
If the unit you are referring to is the 2848, then it is rare indeed, having been discontinued very shortly after it went into production. But it is - in fact - available as a FireWire device as well (secretly, the FireWire version is still SCSI internally, but has a built-in converter, so for all intents and purposes it's just a FW scanner). It runs quite happily on the latest Intel Macs under the new version of FlexColor as well.
It really is an amazing machine, and the glass-free electrostatic flatbed works as advertised
as long as your original is willing to co-operate with it. This basically means reasonably flexible materials without curl, otherwise they will tend to fight the charge and break free from the bed during the scan, at which point you would have been better off with glass Resin papers work really well with it though, and the results are truly fantastic when everything is behaving properly..
That said, the machine does also provide the option of placing originals up to 10mm in thickness under glass for more traditional scans (accomplished by removing the electrostatic mat). This also allows one to scan transparencies up to A3 size at true optical 650DPI across the entire width of the bed, which is quite a nice feature. 8x10 originals could be scanned at 960DPI (optical).
The glass bed is also spring-loaded so that curly originals can be scanned this way so as to avoid the problem I mentioned earlier. This is good, because the scanner has two annoying and fairly serious design flaws that I know of..
One is that the clearance between the electrostatic mat, and the housing that the scanner bed travels into is quite small, and originals which have peeled themselves away from the mat can get caught on this lip and become horribly mangled as the bed moves in or out of the machine. Not good, but easy to avoid by not scanning anything 'risky' on the mat.
The other is that the action of the bed moving in and out of the scanner has a tendency to disconnect the cable which connects the electrostatic mat to the scanner's motherboard loose, causing the mat to stop working completely.. plugging it in would be a simple matter except that the design of the machine requires it to be completely disassembled in order to access the socket, meaning the unit needs to be shipped for service when this happens. The
second time this happened to ours, the plug worked itself into the return path of the flatbed, making it impossible to pack properly for shipping. Not good. Glue would fix this.
Otherwise a fantastic machine though. Not a drum scanner, so I'm not sure why people always insist on comparing them (though I suppose part of the blame for that could rest on the shoulders of Imacon's marketing dept), but still fantastic. Finding one used on ebay for a few $K would be a great option.
