fantastic_four

Somehow I didn't even know this existed until last week. I've loved everything Ennis has done, so I'm looking forward to this.

I got him too, mostly for the Wendigo part. But I ended up liking him a lot, those newly-styled claws are great. They stay straighter than the other Legends claws SO much better. I replaced the claws in my Legends tiger stripe figure with stainless steel claws from a fan customizer who sells effect parts. LOVE them so much better, but the X-Force Wolverine's claws are great too. Comparison pic below.

Cookie Monster isn't looking great either, less than 500 of 3000 sponsors with 9 days left. TIME FOR A MARVEL PROJECT! My fear about that is they will go with the Quinjet first. I could care less about that. A fully-decked out Galactus or Sentinel, though...I'M ALL OVER IT!

Yea that surprises me too. I went looking for an app last month assuming they wanted people to not all roll in at once, but nope, I found nothing. Then went to the site and saw there's nothing but "coming soon" type info.

Could be some variant of that since they did that exact story before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Déjà_Q

Long way off, I'm hearing this won't be out until 2021 or later.

How would you explain Q aging?

I NEVER felt good about how Fox was handling Fantastic Four, and I vociferously complained about it back when these boards first started. But I have near-absolute faith that Feige will find people to do it right this time.

I've heard people suggest that Marvel may make the Eternals film the back story for how the X-Men suddenly emerge, that they carry the "Deviant" gene that Thanos has that made him a mutant on Titan. I have no opinion because I wasn't aware of the Eternals, Deviants, or the fact that Thanos or human mutants could at all related to any of that until recently.

Surprising, I figured he'd eventually ditch it. I guess there's still time.

My Marvel figure of the year for 2019 before July was the Marvel Legends Beast figure. Now it's the Marvel Legends 80th Anniversary Hulk figure that comes in a 2-pack with Wolverine. This is the best Hulk action figure ever made! It's just awesome in almost every way. I mean, you can find ways to improve any figure, but wow, this one kills every other figure released before this. The Wolverine is solid too, which is no surprise since it's based upon the same tiger stripe Wolverine that came out last year that was already the best Marvel Legends figure Hasbro has ever made. No real change from that version of Logan other than the first appearance costume tweaks.

Going to be VERY interesting to see how much he does re-explore the past. So will we eventually see all of the original characters in flashbacks? If so, I wonder who will portray them. Loving what I'm hearing so far.

Thanks for the info! I'll research that a bit more, because it's not a straight line from sensor size to what that does for image quality.

Now THOSE are really good digital camera pics. I'm thinking that if we did a "is it scanned or digitally photographed" challenge where we have to pick which was used to take the image with the best examples of both sources there would be no clear advantage for scanners.

Wait, you have an all-in-one printer/scanner that does legal sized scanning? I didn't think those existed.

I don't know what Photoscan is, but that pic of your AF15 CGC 3.5 is terrible. Awful lighting, pixelated, horribly blurry, and the CGC title and issue number is weirdly double-visioned. If that were the prime argument for digital imagery over scanners, the clear choice would be scanners every time. But I know that's just a bad pic.

What element of the photograph makes scanners inherently better? Is it resolution or something else?

You have to scan at 600 dpi or higher to see the printing dots though don't you? What's your default scanning size?

To point out a few problems: The lighting is dim. The background objects visible along the sides are distracting. The resolution is fairly low, but maybe the one you posted online is lower than the original picture. It's a bit blurry. I can't even read the words "WHITE Pages" under the 9.4 grade, but I know what they look like so I knew what they were without reading them based upon the dimensions of the letters. But these are all solvable problems with digital cameras, so I wouldn't list any of these as inherent advantages of a scanner aside from scanners make these problems far easier to deal with by automatically solving them for you.

Why do they suck? The resolution on digital cameras used to be far worse than scanners, but now they're not unless you're creating 600 dpi or higher images that are far too big for eBay to let you put into auctions. If you're saying that most people don't take good digital pictures and scanners help to simplify the process of taking a picture I would tend to agree. But like I stated in my original post I'm already aware that a photo station with a background and controlled lighting would be necessary, and those are both cheaper and far more dynamic in terms of using space than a big legal scanner that has a fixed amount of space it requires. The elements of a photography station can be put up and stored away in a compact space, and they're also useful for far more than just comics, they can be used for photographing virtually any type of object. So that takes me to what I'm not sure of--are there qualitative elements of a scanner that I'm overlooking that makes scanners inherently superior to a digital camera picture? Maybe. That's why I started the thread, to see if anyone has enough experience with digital photography and scanning to know what the pros of scanning are. Right now the only two pros I know of are extremely high resolution and simplicity of taking the image, but I don't need super-high resolution (and have never used it even when I had it), and I'd rather learn photographic techniques for taking pictures of other types of objects besides comics, so the simplicity of a scanner doesn't appeal to me either.

If yours died tomorrow, would you buy another? If so, why? The reason I started the thread is I'm not sure if scanners really do still produce the best results. It was definitely the best way to go twenty years ago when digital cameras were bad and you didn't want to have to develop photos, but with great digital cameras that upload straight to the cloud, I'm not sure scanners aren't now obsolete for most purposes.

I need to develop that as well. I took a few test photos with glare, then realized that if I don't have lights shining directly at the plastic and just use ambient light there's no glare. But ambient light isn't as bright as I'd like, so I need to figure out how to maximize brightness if that's what I end up using. Ambient light was mostly fine though, just about as good as my old scanner photos.

Yep, but I don't have one. I was looking at new legal-sized scanners for a half-hour when I realized digital cameras are so much better since the last legal scanner I bought that I probably don't need one.

For many years in the aughts I loved my legal-sized MicroTek flatbed scanner. The scan quality was impeccable and the resolution was fantastic. Now, every picture I take of a comic with my phone looks better than almost any scan I took a decade or more ago. Do we really still need legal-sized scanners for our CGC books, or is a well-lit photography station and a great digital camera just fine?

Dammit, WHY kill off Thanos right before the Marvel cosmic stuff starts to ramp up?!?!