I almost bought a scanner. Mainly for my Alpine Panoramics project. The key here is that I am still shooting most of these photos on a Hasselblad Xpan – a long since discontinued film camera that shoots two 35mm frames side by side to achieve a panoramic frame covering approximately 65x24mm.

You cannot get good enough quality scans of these negatives to print them up to 60cm on the short edge with consumer grade scanners. You need to go to the high end. That costs. There are other reasons i almost bought a scanner, that we will get to. This is the scanner in question:

A Hasselblad Flextight X1. Google the thing for the price if you’re curious, and no I wasn’t going to pay that much, I was going to pay less than half of that (a bargain to be fair). Here’s the scanner in action:

As you can see, the Mac connected to the scanner is quite an outdated one. In this case a 2007 iMac. I also got it running with a 2015 Macbook Pro, which is about as up to date as you can be with this scanner. This is where the “almost” becomes clearer.

Almost?

The software that drives these scanners is compiled for 32bit architecture and hasn’t been updated in well over 10 years. Hasselblad refuse to update it to modern architectures, and refuse to open source it to allow others to do that, so you are stuck using an OS that can run it.

Virtualization is difficult as the scanners use SCSI or Firewire connectivity and that is problematic with VMs. So you need a dedicated old rig to run the proprietary software