Scanner hacks

[Colin Graham]

I just made a tray for my M1 that will accommodate a 5x12 negative without having to cut out the back of the glass tray frame. There is plenty of room in the film 'drawer' for a much longer tray than the factory provides. Which got me to thinking- Might there be a way to hack or reprogram the scanner software to use the full depth so I wouldn't have to flip the neg, rescan and photomerge? The reflective mode accommodates 14"- mightn't there be a way to hack the transmissive mode to do this as well?

[BarryS]

Brilliant mod. If the hardware is capable of scanning the full length, a custom driver could be written. Ed Hamrick of Vuescan does the same sort of mods--extending the driver to take advantage of the hardware. Maybe drop him a note and ask about supporting the M1.

[Colin Graham]

Great idea! Thanks Barry.

[Colin Graham]

Ed just replied- says all he needs is a SDK for the scanner and he'll add support for it, until then he knows nothing about it.

Could prove interesting trying to get the right documents out of Microtek, though.

[ASRafferty]

Colin, this was Ted's contact at Microtek, and my memory is that Parker helped him get to engineering when Ted was testing and writing on their machines; maybe he'll put you through to the software guys... probably worth a shot, anyway. Please feel free to tell Parker you got the info from Ted Harris' widow:

Parker Plaisted
Microtek
10900 183rd Street, Suite 290
Cerritos, CA 90703
TEL: 310-687-5840

[Colin Graham]

Thanks so much Amy, that's very generous. It's hard to even use this scanner without thinking about how helpful Ted always was with it, especially when it was first released with it's quirks.

[ASRafferty]

It's very important that creative thinking like yours be supported... good luck! :)