Silverfast Not Detecting Scanner

[Beronike Watkin]

Vuescanisn't a driver as much as it is a separate program, like Silverfast, to run your scanner. Digital ICE and ROC aren't present in the same form, but Vuescan does offer infrared cleaning and color fading and restoration options. They aren't the same as NikonScan, but with Macs, the NikonScan software is very old PowerPC code and, while it can run under rosetta in Leopard and Snow Leopard, rosetta isn't available after Lion came out.

Another option could be to run Windows in a virtual machine on your mac so you can run the Windows version of NikonScan and retain the Digital ICE and Digital ROC features. Honestly, I've never really used either of those features in NikonScan since my macs were intel based, and I already had a copy of Vuescan.

The infrared cleaning, according to most people isn't as good as the ICE implementation in NikonScan, but it's definitely better than it used to be. With some faded prints I scanned with a flatbed, I was shocked how well the restore fading feature worked in the filters tab of Vuescan. Both those options may do well enough to suit you.

With Silverfast, I wasn't very impressed with it's infrared cleaning artifacts. It did quite well detecting (once I had a properly working scanner - in another thread I noted my scanner wasn't picking up defects), but the artifacts it left were almost as ugly or worse than leaving the defects in place.

In order to use FW for hardware in Windows 7, you need to use what is called a "legacy" driver. It's part of Windows, but not by default. Open the Device Manager aplet in the Control Panel, and "update" the driver. You will find a list of drivers under the "Browse my computer" heading.

Nikon scanners came with a primitive FW card which wasn't much useful for anything else. Even under XP, I had to shop around to find a compatible card (q.v., Texas Instruments 1394 OHCI Host Controller). Apple was devoted to Firewire, but later dropped it for USB and whatever their latest I/O is called.

It sounds like a connectivity or driver problem. Vuescan should install a driver for the scanner but the OS may not be recognizing it. What is the Mac equivalent of device manager in Windows? Look there for a problem device with the scanner connected and turned on. I just looked at the specifications which show data transfer as USB1.1, is your computer reverse compatible?

I had to dual boot my Dell XPS8500 running a clean install of Windows 10 with Windows 7 to run Silverfast and my Plustek 7600i. Buying a Win 7 pro disk off ebay was less expensive than purchasing an upgrade to Silverfast 8. The 7600i will run on Windows 10 on Vuescan. I have a Plustek 7200 that I will sell cheap as it does not run on Windows 10.

@ Pureum. Yes it sure will! This article is applicable for most scanners. Variations will be based on tray holder size and layout, manual focus, multi-exposure and ICE, which is entirely dependant on scanner hardware.

@Johan, thanks for the nice guide. I just bought the 5400 for little money and now I wonder if I need a specific Silverfast software? Is SE 8.8 sufficient or do I need something more fancy? Se Plus? AI Studio? Cheers, Jaroslaw

@Michael. Thanks for the anecdote! I too can confirm that Silverfast is very RAM heavy. When I edit and scan on my 16GB Macbook Pro it dies. When doing the same on my Desktop with 64GB RAM it flies! Again, thanks for pointing that out. I should have mentioned that in my article.

Hi there, I am having some problems with my 5400. On all of my scanned pictures stray light / flares appear on the left and right side. First I thought my Mju is broken but it also appears with my G1 and old slides.

I normally account for that with some gradients in LR but this is getting very annoying lately.Here is how it look before and after adjusting it:

nc.helbaco.de/s/52KoWb6EzdN4eTkAnybody experienced with that?

Johan, please delete this post if you feel like I am misusing your comment section.

@Jaroslaw you have a light leak possibly due to someone opening your scanner before and removing adhesive. Get a guide online how to open the scanner (free) get some gaffer tape and patch up the light leak.@Laine the 5400 II has no downsides. Get it and a cheap old Windows PC or Mac and run the original Minolta software.

@Johan Thanks for your reply. Any idea where to look for the light leak? I opened the scanner and patched up some tape around the plate that covers the lens. No avail. Any ideas are highly appreciated!

silverfast are unclear about which version of 8 actually works with 5400 mark one. does the software use its own driver to see your minolta? you cannot use dimage software on windows 10 32 bit and silverfast stopped 32 bit support so a bit fogged. anyone care to tell me their current setup? or i go mac?

I could use an answer too. I just installed VueScan and Silverfast on macOS. VueScan worked out of the box (except my DiMAGE 5400 seems proper effed). Although SilverFast detected the scanner, it told me to install a driver (without providing one). Where the hell am I supposed to get a driver for a 17-year-old scanner that works on a 64bit ARM CPU? At least VueScan works without an OS driver.

Currently I'm using Silverfast 8.5 SE to scan my 35mm negs (bw and colour) with a Plustek 8200i scanner. The software has several settings pertaining to desired colour depth however none of them yield 16bit Tiffs (only 8bit tiffs). Trying to wrap my head around it, I believe (but I'm not certain) that I need to pay additional money to get the Silverfast AI version to be able to produce 16bit tiffs. Trying any of the suggested 16bit settings, inverted, highly compressed 16bit files are produced as such:

Quite likely but I haven't used SE for ages. With SilverFast nothing beyond the bundled SE version comes cheap. I decided after much angst that the HDRI version with batch scanning for digital negative archiving on my Nikon CoolScan 5000 saved me so much time that it was worth it - I think...

You should be able to upgrade online, but for a Plustec scanner it will be expensive. If you do go down that route look at the HDRi upgrade as it's an excellent and fast tool for scanning high-res 64Bit files (80-160MB) from 35mm negs for digital archiving (it also stores an IR scan for later scratch & dust removal).

I don't know what HDRi upgrades are or how they would help me (I assume 64bit files must mean something else entirely - is it 16bit/channel + 1 channel ir??). AI can do 'multiple exposure-scans' and I assume 16bit files (but it seems impossible to get a yes or no-answer for such a seemingly straight forward question which is why I guess there is something I'm not understanding here).

I also don't know Silverfast but there's a comparison here, brings up a window with a PDF wherein it says the SE and AI can do "48-bit/16-bit RAW Data" and that AI in addition can do "48-bit/16-bit Images". This Silverfast forum thread seems to suggest 16-bit is only in the AI version.

For such an upgrade price, a pro licence of Vuescan (which many here use and can help with) is a considerably cheaper alternative that will give you full access to all your scanner's hardware functions out of the box. And unlimited future upgrades.

I use vuescan, I find it much easier to repeatedly get good scans. For colour, vuescan requires a colour profile for the scanner - - the target is quite cheap and super easy to use. I use just one for all film, once its close its easy to tweak in LR or PS.

I did buy the pro version, so now I ave to get a hold of that target. I thought it was an issue of not handling the orange mask properly. one would think that the scanner producer (Plustek) would provide said profile

Vuescan is highly influenced by the operator because unless the correct settings are used it has no way of knowing what the correct colours are. Silverfast may work differently but I have no patience for the bloated interface and costs of running it. The crucial thing to consider whichever scanning software you use is you should only be getting close enough to the end result, not all the way there, because scanning software is too crude at making fine corrections compared with Lightroom or Photoshop. The skill of the operator is recognising what 'close enough' actually is.

well, unless it's a properly counter-intuitive interface I have dialled in sufficient information; selected film (ektar or Portra). both yield horrible results (ektar worse than portra though, it was generally the other way around in silverfast). ultimately silverfast knew what colours to use (having fiddled about a bit).

Vuescan is great for C41 and easy to setup to get linear RAW TIFFs for use in ColorPerfect in Photoshop. True, Vuescan's interface is a bit convoluted but there's logic to it (input through output) and it's become a bit better over the years. Try following this guide for a first start on settings - it should give you an OK result. And once you've got ColorPerfect (there's also a trial version but which adds a grid on the image), follow this guide to get linear TIFFs. ColorPerfect works really well with C41 (less so (imho) with E6 which I scan as normal TIFFs these days). There are other ways to deal with the orange mask, but CP is the easiest and well worth the money.

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