My first "real" job out of college was working at a printing company. It's a fairly large plant situated in a little tiny nowhere farming town. I worked in the pre-press department as one of five people who scanned and color corrected photos for the numerous trade magazines and weekly newspaper ads printed there. I really was stoked at finally getting to work with cool equipment. I remember being especially enamoured of the TWENTY-ONE INCH monitors everyone used! THAT was a big deal to me then. Hell, it's still a big deal. You can never have a monitor that's too big or too high resolution. Okay, maybe you can but we aren't there yet. Anyway, the main attraction in the department was a ginormous Hell drum scanner. Yes, "Hell" is the name of the company. It's German. This thing was a monstrosity, it took up the entire width of the room (about 12 feet I reckon) and also had an outboard box full of electronics the size of a refridgerator. Think of those early computers which took up entire rooms. I am not sure if vacuum tubes were inside, but I wouldn't be surprised. I scrounged around Google to see if I could find a picture of one of them and this is about the closest I could find. Sorry it isn't larger.
This PMT (photo mutiplier tube) drum scanner was probably about $100,000 or so and capable of recording the finest images you could imagine. In theory, that is. You see, this device is designed by engineers. Engineers are extremely smart people, they know their stuff. Sadly, they aren't quite as good as making stuff easy to use for people less smart than they are. No, let's not say "easy to use" because a device like this probably shouldn't be easy to use. It's a professional tool after all, not a consumer widget. It should at least be ABLE to be comprehended by the average power user, that's all I ask!
The company had purchased this unit used from some other company a few months before I started working there. They were very proud of it. It was given its own room with a sign on the door about how it must be kept closed to keep out dust. And why shouldn't they be proud? After dropping all that dough you might as well make the scanner feel special.
When you've got such a massive and complex piece of pre-press equipment that you want to put into service you're gonna need some help, right? Help came in the form of a representative from Hell (I wish they were called "minions") who flew in from Germany to train the photo people on how to use this beast. I think he was there for like a week. I am not sure, as I said this training period occured before I got the job.
When you've got fundamentally difficult equipment like this the training you receive on it often takes the form of step-by-step actions one must take in order to make a scan. You couldn't hope to truly grok this behemoth unless you were one of the engineers who designed it, and I wonder if even they knew. But they managed to boil it down to a number of fairly straight forward steps that you had to punch in to get this thing to scan. It involved setting your scanning area, focusing on the film under extrem magnification, measuring the lightest and darkest areas of the photo, adjusting colors and sharpening. After awhile we got the hang of it, but we pretty much stayed away from the deeper menus. Scary territory there, one wrong move and you could blow up the universe!
After I got the job the people who received the training first hand then taught me how to use the Hell. After a few months of using the Hell I got a little more comfortable using it and experimented a little with the different settings. As it turned out there was indeed a sharpening setting which yielded better results than what they had told us to use. Otherwise we would get these really dark and heavy, high contrast halos around image detail. It was sharp, but looked very unnatural. People's s faces became very harsh and grainy, like they had an odd skin condition. The look really bugged me. It was clearly apparent on the printed proof as well, not just on the screen.
I worked second shift with one other guy and we got along really well. A rivalry kind of developed between us and the first shift crew. The first shift people were all part of the Good Ole Boys Club meaning that they had friendly ties with upper management. This was a very small town and nepotism was rampant in the company. This is great if you're Family, but for me I was an "outsider" as was my cohort. But the rivalry was more than this, it was also a fight over the scanner settings. They were dead set on the dark and heavy edges look while we rebellious 2nd shifters always put the scanner settings where they looked better, and rules be damned. Yes, I realize this can be a subjective thing but I am putting my foot down: Our settings WERE objectively better! We had no unnatural artifacts in our scans.
This bitterness slowly simmered underneath the surface as time went on. The second shift crew continued to embarass the 1st shift crew, getting stuff doner quicker, better and more efficiently. We were also successful in satisfying the desires of one particularly onerous customer who was such a stickler for image quality that he was feared by the rest of the company when his magazine came in the department. This incident and others like it, all more or less having to do with me and my partner doing things not necessarily according to the rules eventually resulted in my untimely termination. They told me "I wasn't a team player"! (The stress of getting fired at the time overrode what I now take as the highest compliment!) Oh it was a hard blow for sure, getting canned from your first real job, but I got over it eventually.
Now I look back with some more perspective on it. It's funny how wrapped up people can get over machines. I think it has to do with fear of failure. I think the other guys were a little bit scared to mess with the scanner. They didn't really care about the results, as long as they were doing what was asked of them they were cool. But you can't be afraid of these things. You've gotta go in there and see what stuff does. It's not gonna bite you! We're not talking about a dangerous device that will chop your fingers off if you don't do it right, it's just a fucking scanner! If it doesn't look right, change it. If it's not cooperating, try something else!
And we did have something else! In addition to the giant drum scanner there was also a smaller drum scanner as well as a large flatbed scanner. These two "lesser" machines were vastly easier to use and in most cases produced equal or better results than the giant Hell. The only thing the Hell was really good at was making ridiculous enlargements of 35mm slides. But you had to oil mount them, a particularly tedious and messy process. For reflective art the large flatbed did wonders. Even though you could wrap a piece of paper around the large 24" wide drum on the Hell it just did not capture the surface texture of art paper at all.
I went on to have far less stressful and confrontational jobs in the graphic arts business and am happy to still be scanning stuff today. I am using far cheaper equipment now, but I have 100% total control over the equipment. I don't get to work with beautiful large format chromes anymore, but it's much better than having to deal with a bunch of brown nosers towing the company line for good or ill.
Once I even got a small bit of revenge. It was not as sweet as I had hoped, but it felt good nevertheless. At one point I got sent out to do a press check at my old employer. Years later the very same company who canned me was now working for ME! *MUWHAHAHA!!!* Unfortunately I didn't see any of the old 1st shift jerks nor my old asshole boss, but I did get to see my former co-worker. They had a new scanner by that time and I am sure it was much easier to use than the Hell. It's a shame that so much fuss was had over something so simple, but it all worked out in the end.
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