Cruse Scanners Offer Fine Art Solution

When Sally Mitchell Fine Arts of Newark, Nottingham, upgraded its print production process the company realised that a Cruse scanner offered the best option for producing accurate copies of paintings

When it comes to high performing scanners with the facilities for copying original fine art and graphic work in great detail and producing superb solutions, there can be little argument that the best in the field are those individually built and configured by Herman Cruse.

Cruse scanners, exclusively distributed in the UK by Capix, have long been recognised as the leading systems of their type.

World famous for their ability to faithfully capture images of the finest detail and to create reproductions virtually indistinguishable from the original, Cruse scanners are in use at such locations as: the Beethoven Museum in Bonn, Germany; the Vatican's Secret Archives; NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas; the Pentagon, and industry leading photographic, repro and fine art companies.

The Newark company's founder Sally Mitchell, in researching the options available, realised that a Cruse scanner offered the best option for producing accurate copies of the many original paintings in which her company trades.

Founded nearly 40 years ago, Sally Mitchell Fine Arts is listed by the British Fine Art Trade Guild as one of Britain's top five fine art publishing houses.

Sally Mitchell started the business dealing in early sporting paintings - a subject on which she is universally acknowledged to be a leading authority, having written the main reference work on sporting art: The Dictionary of British Equestrian Artists.

It was with this deep working knowledge of sporting art that Mitchell moved on to dealing in contemporary artists and publishing sporting and country prints.

In addition to building the largest library of high quality limited edition dogs prints in Europe, if not the world, the company publishes prints covering a wide range of subject matter, all of them now being reproduced via the Cruse scanner to a highly receptive international audience.

The scanner being utilised by Sally Mitchell is the Cruse CS 185 ST model which takes originals up to 100 x 150cm (40 x 50inch) and produces images up to 14,000 x 26,640 pixels.

The system incorporates an automatic light correction program which reads objects up to 12cm (5inch) in depth to ensure strong, even light across the surface.

The system offers variable scan resolution and texture effects in order to produce copies which capture every nuance of an original painting.

A variety of optional extras, including such items as variable scan speed, frame correction and different lighting configurations, are available to take the system to even higher levels of flexibility and application.

The Cruse scanner employed by Sally Mitchell Fine Arts has quickly become the basis for all imaging aspects of the company's business.

In addition to producing limited edition prints - which the company can mount and frame on demand at its workshops - a collection of greeting cards, gift-wraps, tags, postcards, paper is printed using images from the scanner.

A recently added aspect of the company's business benefiting from the scanner is publishing books about the artists it represents.

The first volume contains over 190 colour illustrations which, had the company been using the previous photographic method of repro, would have cost in excess of GBP6000.

"The system has proved totally flexible and meets all our imaging needs," comments Sally Mitchell.

"Right through to our catalogues and marketing material, not to mention such aspects as keeping our websites fed with images, and using them in our licensing literature - this being another important facet of our business which has benefited greatly from installing the Cruse".

"We have only had the scanner installed by Capix for some six weeks, but already it has proved to be of far greater benefit than we ever considered likely".

Sally Mitchell's son John runs the day-to-day operation of the company, managing a staff of nine highly skilled and enthusiastic workers and six 'artists in residence' plus other artists who all produce a constant stream of fresh work which, along with the limited edition prints taken from them, the company markets throughout its global network of agents, dealers, online customers and the stands it takes at various major equestrian and county fairs and shows.

"A major advantage of the Cruse scanning system is its ability to scan perfectly through glass while its paten can work on pictures still in their frames," says John Mitchell.

"It is this ease of operation which has enabled us to provide scanning and related services to other fine art dealers, galleries, artists, collectors and distributors, as well as completing our own work, including supplies for own high street gallery".

"We previously used a scan backed camera for our repro work, and before that the services of a specialist photographic studio".

"While those methods were fine and suited our needs at the time, we came to a point of expansion where we recognised that to progress to the levels we sought, and which we knew were possible, a more advanced approach was necessary".

John and Sally Mitchell checked out many types of scanners, and rapidly became aware that in order to advance the reputation they had built for high quality prints and images, it was necessary to utilise the best of the high-end systems available.

"Having reached that decision, the Cruse scanner was our obvious choice, and I am delighted to report that it has lived up to all our expectations and more," declares John Mitchell.

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