Strobe lighting more "accurate"?

[vitorio]

Came across this article discussing using strobe lights for tin plate photographic preservation:

http://topdogimaging.net/blog/restoring ... -the-1870s

The LED in the scanner that illuminates artwork emits diffused ("soft") light... Diffused light also has the tendency to flatten out the overall tonal range of an original that may not be visible to the naked eye... I use strobe lights to illuminate the artwork. Strobes produce "hard" light, much like the sun on a clear day. In addition to the strobes, I place a polarizer over the camera lens and polarizer gels over the strobe lights. This eliminates all reflections and enables the camera to pick up a greater tonal range along with more detail.

Is this accurate? Has anyone looked at using strobes to more "accurately" light book pages?

There was already a thread about using polarized glass for the platens.

[jgreely]

Badly written, I'd say. The "hardness" isn't because they're strobes, it's because of how the light from his strobes is directed at the object. A hot-light setup with standard metal reflectors will be just as hard, compared to a flatbed scanner. The polarization setup is pretty standard, and you can find out more than you'll ever need to know about this sort of work by picking up a copy of Kodak's old "Copying and Duplicating" book.

-j