Minolta Dimage Scan Dual II & Old Computer

[mbisc]

I had been running an (ancient) Minolta Dimage Scan Dual II on an equally ancient Pentium II machine with Windows XP, and even there the Minolta software was running in Win95 compatibility mode.

Anyhow, this combination had been dormant for a while (other priorities in life etc.), and now that I want to unbox my scanner again, I have a couple of options.

1) don't change anything (but the old computer is taking an awful lot of space on my desk)

2) find a way to run the Minolta software on my new Notebook (has a brand-spanking new i7 processor, and Windows 7) -- is that even possible???

3) get a new scanner (which one???) for my new computer

As before, I would do both B&W negatives and slides with it. Since I use a wet darkroom for my MF and LF stuff, I really only use it for 35mm film...

What should I do?

Thanks in advance!

 

[damien.murphy]

Try Vuescan. You'll need to pay for a full copy, but may ease your pain a lot, and should run on your notebook fine.

 

[MartinP]

I'd suggest running the old scanner under one of the 'universal' scanner driving programs. Second option, though more technical, would be to make a virtual-machine on the notebook and restore the image of the hard-drive from the old pc (or re-install XP if you have the cd etc.).

 

[mbisc]

Try Vuescan. You'll need to pay for a full copy, but may ease your pain a lot, and should run on your notebook fine.

If I were to go the Vuescan route -- how good/bad is Vuescan? I have read anything from "great" to "awful"? What are its advantages/disadvantages?

 

[damien.murphy]

Hi Mike,

I won't lie to you, I'd never class it as user-friendly software, but my tack with scanning has been to switch off all the settings really, and just get a flat file, with the most possible detail from the scanner. From there, I take it into an image editing program, and go from there.

To do the above, you don't need to delve too much into Vuescan, but to be honest the way I looked at it, I will only have to learn this stuff once, as Vuescan would appear to be the swiss army knife of 3rd party scanning programs.

There is a learning curve, as mentioned, but you can always download the free demo & see how you go. The demo doesn't expire, but does put watermarks over your exported image, unless you buy a license.

 

[damien.murphy]

To recap though;

Vuescan advantages: cross platform, supports a LOT of scanners, pro license contains unlimited upgrades

Vuescan disadvantages: not the most user-friendly (but then neither is any 'advanced' scanning software, and other main alternative Silverfast is worse, imo)

Best of a bad lot, if you ask me. No slight to the software's functionality, just it's limited user-friendliness.

 

[mbisc]

Thanks for all the information!

 

[damien.murphy]

Best of luck with whatever you decide Mike!

 

[reubelim]

Was in the same boat. Happy to report that Vuescan allows my scan dual II to run perfectly with my HP i7 laptop. Got the professional edition with lifetime updates. Also use it with a Canoscan 9000f for medium format without any problems.

Tried really hard to get the scan dual ii to work with my i7 prior to buying the vuescan. It just wouldn't.

FWIW, I think the vuescan software is quite reasonable for what it does. Editing functions are rudimentary and I am still befuddled by a few controls (like optimal black/whitepoint settings on images w/ problematic exposures), but it also allows me to save the image in tiff or dng "raw" format, and then I can play with the scanned image some more using the vuescan edit tools before I shoot it off to photoshop.

Almost forgot, vuescan gives multi-pass capability to the scan dual ii for improved DR (one pass for highlights and another for more shadow detail, etc.). This is a sweet feature.

HTH.