Another use case for digital backs in early 2000's was product photography.
Indeed! Although what I described earlier was an example of the first time I saw a DCS system in use, it was far from the last. By 2000, I had worked at other agencies, including one whose client was one of the area’s major grocers. They had one studio with a DCS setup in use, reserved exclusively for that client, and it was for shooting product photos for weekly circulars. This would have been late 1999.
In hindsight, what intrigues me about the timing of DCS shoots for products in weekly newspaper circulars/flyers locally was, just one year prior, right around when i first saw that DCS paired to a Bondi iMac, I contracted for a service bureau whose bread and butter workload was the digitization of multiple format transparencies supplied by a major national discount retailer. These were scanned to a Scitex drum scanning system, followed by a team (of which I was a part) awaiting new scans added to a network volume. We were tasked with cleaning each fresh scan, to remove dust and imperfections, adjusting colour and setting to designated ICC profile, and to create clipping paths around products, before dumping those amended sources to another directory for the next company responsible for doing the actual layouts. I’m unsure how much longer that client arrangement lasted before DCS and other digital-source solutions took over, as I only contracted there once.
The last time I saw a DCS system in use was for a photo shoot I directed in 2002.
There is a local large consumer supermarket/department store -company with several chains of stores and their ad department had Hasselblad-cameras with digital backs. Perfect for studio photography with proper lighting (light boxes etc.). If I remember it right the the digital back (or the camera+digi back) was around 200.000-250.000 of our old pre euro currency which would make it 51500-64400 euros of todays money.
Yah. I never got to see a Phase One paired with a Hasselblad 500 body. As I recall, those digital backs
alone ran, entry pricing, around $40,000 in freedom dollars, ca. 2001, and no local ad agency or service bureau at that point
that I was aware of had gone all-in with a Phase One solution.
Seems expensive but when they shoot a dozen or more catalogues a year with thousands of products, film, development and scanning costs + time adds up quickly and the digi-thing starts to sound smart quite quickly. I think the old drum scanners (Heidelberg?) they used to scan film were at least around the same price range, or more, when new.
Heidelberg sounds about right. If not the above servce bureau, then at least one of the other handful for which I contracted had a Heidelberg drum scanner. I always wanted to be trained on one, but I never got that opportunity. But I
do remember the need for mineral oil!
Yah. The H-series. That was their crown jewel. There was also the entry-end LightPhase and the other high-end PowerPhase, but the H-series offered fewer restrictions on the need to tether.
