Film scanning with a flatbed scanner.

 I've been involved in my family's genealogy for several decades, off and on.

The family tree is extensive and goes back to Charleston, SC in 1685.

One of my pursuits in that direction is the digitization of an extensive print and film collection with items dating back to the 1940s.

About ten tears ago, I attempted to begin using a Mustek flatbed scanner. That unit was okay for prints and general family documents but was not able to scan film.  I removed the scanner's fluorescent tube and used a fluorescent flashlight to scan film with greater or lesser degrees of success.

The next unit was a Microtek 5600. That unit could use an accessory to scan film. Eventually, I abandoned the scanner and the task. I acquired the accessory but was unimpressed.

A few months ago, I found a Canon LiDE 110 at a thrift shop for a few bucks. The associated software was still available and installed readily. That scanner is a portable USB scanner that uses a personal computer's USB port for power as well as data transmission.

Again, unfortunately, the scanner does not do film although it does quite well with prints. 

A couple of days ago, I found a flatbed scanner designed to do film scans. This on requires a power adapter. They typically run $45 on eBay. The one in the thrift shop came with an adapter.

To my dismay, the software was a problem. All the variations on the company site were identical. No real difference between Windows 8.1 and Windows Vista versions.

New scanners come with media stored on an optical disk, i.e., CD, DVD, blu-ray. I managed to get the identifying data for the CD for the scanner and did a google search. Somewhat to my surprise. there were two different copies at the Internet Archive (archive.org), so I dowloaded both. Digitized optical disks are typically stored in iso format and are burnt to disk in that form. They can also be opened and unpacked using appropriate software.

Now, at this point, I had installed the versions available at the company site, to no avail. There was no use trying versions for different Windows versions since all were alike.

The same result occurred with the iso's from the Internet Archive.

However, I ran across an idea I had tried in a different context, and that was installing an appropriate version of Windows (7) in a virtual machine. In this case, I used the software from the company VMware.

After getting the Win 7 up and running, I found how to access an external USB hard drive from within the Win 7 virtual machine. The scanner iso software was easy to install. 

The only remaining task is to run the virtual machine and attach the scanner and run the scanner software.

Unfortunately, that did not work.

What I eventually discovered was the USB cord I was using was bad. I replaced the cord and the software worked, even without the virtual machine and Windows 7.


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