Repro company GBM is developing a market for high-quality fine art and archival scans to recreate almost exact copies of priceless items.


Its new Cruse flatbed has scanned oil paintings from the Lowry art gallery and watercolours and pressed flowers from The Royal Horticultural Society.


The large-format scanner is the only one in the country, according to product development director Des Bradshaw.
This technology captures images and works from the past for reproduction today and tomorrow, he said.


The capture is phenomenal and you can use the scans for creating archival records and documentation of the surface of a work of art. The Royal Horticultural Society has an enormous amount of material dating back to the 1700s, and lots of it never sees the light of day. This machine could change that.


He suggested galleries and museums could license their images for use by firms such as Royal Doulton.
The Manchester firm is trialling the machine, which scans from stamp size to A0, has a resolution of 800dpi and produces scans of up to 400MB.


Bradshaw said the list price of the Cruse was around 70,000 and it had a protective cradle to hold fragile first editions.
There were only a handful of these types of scanners in the world and this one was like a battleship.


Story by Jez Abbott