Polaroid Sprintscan 45 Ultra

[shileshjani]

Thank you everyone for the education about SCSI/Vuescan. I am planning on migrating from my current Win XP Pro 32 bit to a new box with Win 7 64 bit, and I was worried that my SS 120 will not have the requisite driver for the new OS. But seems like I might still be able to use it with Vuescan.

This is an awesome forum for information. Happy Independence Day!

Shilesh

[Willem]

There's a Polaroid Sprintscan 120 for sale in the Netherlands. Bit pricy at €950 Euro, although you can offer less and see whether it will e accepted. Checkout www.marktplaats.nl if interested. (I bought a Screen instead via this website.)

[tbeaman]

Thank you everyone for the education about SCSI/Vuescan. I am planning on migrating from my current Win XP Pro 32 bit to a new box with Win 7 64 bit, and I was worried that my SS 120 will not have the requisite driver for the new OS. But seems like I might still be able to use it with Vuescan.

Your only worry now will be the compatibility of the SCSI card.

This all reminds me that I need to hook up that Sprintscan 35 plus I picked up for nothing recently and see how it compares to the 4990 for miniature format.

[Thilo Schmid]

I'm operating a SprintScan 45 Ultra on current Hardware running Windows 7 x64. VUESCAN handles this without grumble.The original Polacolor Insight Software will not run on anything beyond Windows XP, because the scanner driver architecture has been changed twice since then. The right SCSI-Adapter is your only concern here. You'll have to find one that has a Single Ended Bus (SE), like an Adaptec prior to Ultra 320. Newer versions with a Low Voltage Differential Bus (LVD) will not work.

VUESCAN is even more powerful than the original Insight Software, though I liked their unique dodge and burn feature which VUESCAN does not offer. There is, however, one drawback. VUESCAN does not calibrate the scanner in the same way the Insight Software did. The Scanner has a bult-in white target for calibration (which should be cleaned from time to time) and VUESCAN obviously did not take this into account the same way as the original drivers did. This may result in visible stripes, especially when scanning negatives where a gamma >1 is applied (i.e. contrast is increased and more stripes become visible as the CCDs in the array age differently). If necessary, these stripes can be eliminated with a relative simple Photoshop operation (combine it with a mask scanned from a blank slide). It’s worth the trouble, because it is still a very good scanner, delivering up to 500MB of actually useful data out of a 4x5 color slide. It also performs well on B&W negs, because of it can deliver raw data with 16-bit grey values which allow you to deliver roughly as much grey tones in the lightroom as you could in a darkroom ;-)

[dneilson]

I did a search for Polacolar Insight and came up with several links to download the program. here is one.

http://download.cnet.com/Polaroid-Po...2_4-27475.html

[domaz]

I'm operating a SprintScan 45 Ultra on current Hardware running Windows 7 x64. VUESCAN handles this without grumble.The original Polacolor Insight Software will not run on anything beyond Windows XP, because the scanner driver architecture has been changed twice since then. The right SCSI-Adapter is your only concern here. You'll have to find one that has a Single Ended Bus (SE), like an Adaptec prior to Ultra 320. Newer versions with a Low Voltage Differential Bus (LVD) will not work.

Actually you can get it to work with an LVD bus with the right adapter. Just guessing maybe something like this?. LVD SCSI has always been compatable with non-LVD.

[Thilo Schmid]

LVD SCSI has always been compatable with non-LVD.

Not as far as I know, see e.g. http://www.storagesearch.com/lvdart.html. Only multimode bus systems are able to serve both kinds of signaling. This has nothing to do with the plug or the number of pins on it which could be handled by a corresponding adaptor. However, it will not work with a later generation Adaptec 39320 (Ultra 320) which I have tried.

[domaz]

Not as far as I know, see e.g. http://www.storagesearch.com/lvdart.html. Only multimode bus systems are able to serve both kinds of signaling. This has nothing to do with the plug or the number of pins on it which could be handled by a corresponding adaptor. However, it will not work with a later generation Adaptec 39320 (Ultra 320) which I have tried.

Running a non-LVD device on an LVD bus will downgrade the entire bus for sure but it should work. The link you gave also says the same thing:

If you have a multimode LVD bus and you connect a SE peripheral to it, the entire bus will switch to the SE mode.

Also from an Adaptec 39320 Features list:

The Adaptec 39320/39320A card is backwards compatible with virtually any
legacy Ultra2, Ultra, and Single-Ended (SE) SCSI device, except High
Voltage Differential (HVD) devices. However, performance is degraded to
SE speed, and SE cable length restrictions must be adhered to, when an
SE device is connected to the bus. Dual-independent channels allow LVD
and SE devices to operate separately at peak performance.

It should work with anything but HVD- very unlikely a scanner is HVD.

[Thilo Schmid]

It should work with anything but HVD- very unlikely a scanner is HVD.

No, the scanner has definitly a SE connection. But it could also been an issue of the device driver. The card BIOS of the 39320 listed the scanner on boot time with the correct id and name, but Win 7 was not able to detect any scanner (nor any other (unknown) device) on it. This immediately worked after changing to a 39160 and the corresponding drivers.

[D. Bryant]

I did a search for Polacolar Insight and came up with several links to download the program. here is one.

http://download.cnet.com/Polaroid-Po...2_4-27475.html

This is a worthless link. It eventually takes you to the Polaroid web site where one can find a PDF file instructing the installation of scanner software. IOW, not the actual drivers or scanning software for any OS.

Don Bryant