ABOVE GROUND POOL PUMP SAND FILTER

Taken with a Polaroid 600 SE with the 127mm. I forget the aperture but it was a cloudy day and I remember they shutter being something like 1/4 sec. I think the piece of tape on his snout is from this scanner that I got months ago and hadn't used a single time until last night to scan this photo.

Scanned using an Epson v-500 at 1200 dpi and compression at 16 on Professional mode. Full Auto mode scans a bit faster (around 57 seconds for each of the 3? x 4? instant prints) but it added some weird .jpeg artifacts. Actual size when masked in Professional mode turned into something like 3.6 x 4.2 for some reason. I'll write things down next time. Final scan came out to be 5094 x 4144. Oh. I guess that gives me the dimensions too. Shut up. 3.453 x 4.245

Colour pack film has these really, really tiny pits on the surface, maybe a few per square millimeter, that are pretty neat when you look at them up close. (Well, Fuji pack film does anyway, I haven't checked Polaroid pack or sheet and never noticed it on Polaroid 600) Apparently, the angle of incidence of the scanner light is perfect for filling those pits with light and presenting them to you as a bojillion little faint specks which you will think is dust and will cause you to spend 10 minutes squeezing a rocket blower over the scan bed and photo and 20 minutes moving and scanning the photo.

Adobe Elements 6.0 dust and scratch remover at 2 pixel radius and threshold of 2 to remove the thousands and thousands of little specks and applied warming filter (LB1 or 81, I don't remember exactly now) to correct slight blue tint from scanner. (Turned the border faintly yellow; you can see the difference in the next photo of Harrah)

Colour rendering after the warming filter is closer but still not exact, specifically the reds, and overall it seems slightly muddier than when I was looking at it on another computer. Now I have first hand experience on why one would want one of those colour calibration things to stick on their monitor. I don't know how much of it is the whole, "No way man, a digital image can't capture the saturation and depth of a print". I'm hoping that the difference is at least consistant and I can just adjust the curves and slap on the same filters for each scan.

(I just noticed the slow fade to white of the border as you go up and how distracting it is)

There's still some dust in there that the camera's flash brings out. The inside of this DMX looks very different than most, because of the lack of solder mask on the board, typical for very early models like mine. The MRAM upgrade is sitting underneath the Z80 (which has also been replaced, apparently as a precautionary measure against potentially unreliable CPU chips installed in these machines). Notice the missing battery and empty RAM chip sockets.

On the left you can see the row of voice cards, which contain all the drum samples in the machine. The DMX has a modular approach to playing back its sampled sounds. The computer simply sends out pulse triggers to these cards, which are self-contained devices capable of playing back 1 to 3 samples stored as 8-bit companded data on one or more EPROM's, with analog filtering and enveloping in the signal path after the DAC. This is in contrast to something like a LinnDrum, where many of the voices are multiplexed together and can share the same circuitry and filtering. The cards are totally capable of working on their own with any decent trigger signal and power source.

This kind of card-based modular design seems to be inherited from Oberheim's polyphonic synthesizers like the OB-Xa and OB-X, that featured 4- to 8-voice configurations via individual voice boards. It has its genesis in the company's SEM-based systems, where the modules that comprised each voice of the synthesizer were complete monosynths, with the capability of working on their own. However, by the time Oberheim released the DX, a scaled-down drum machine featuring six voices instead of eight, this type of design was abandoned in favor of simply swapping out individual EPROM chips, similar to the machines produced by Linn Electronics.