Help with Antique Linotype Scanner

[smiffy47]

I have just acquired a very old Linotype Hell Saphire scanner (Product No ELS-2100) because it was only £5 and, if it works should be able to scan large negatives and slides. Does anyone have any experience, drivers, advice, or manuals about these dinosaurs?
Thanks
Steve

Life...It's difficult not to take it personally.

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[ian20x]

Join the club! I bought my Linotype Hell Saphire over a year ago now for the same reason. It sat under the bed gathering dust for sometime now.

Thought I was getting a bargain- £20 for scanner that once retailed closer to £5k. It was only after I bought it I discovered the drivers I got were for a Mac. So I have the CD-ROM but no Mac.

After buying my SCSI card and and cable this week for the PC, I've been trying to get a Mac emulator to work but no luck just yet.

How are you doing? Any luck locating drivers for it? What are you hooking it up to- PC or Mac?

 

[ian20x]

I've just come across something new:

http://www.hamrick.com/

They offer some scanner software which should support the Saphire only now I need a USB to SCSI adaptor for it to work. I'll have to wait another week or so for the my new cable to arrive.

But hey, these negatives have been sat around for 80 years now so whats another week

 

[smiffy47]

Thanks for the driver link. I can offer

http://members.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=843839

as another idea.
Having installed the driver the next problem I've encountered, which explains why the Linotype Hell is in the garage at present, is that having connected it all up, and sat with bated breath and high excitement, the computer just fails to acknowledge the existence of any new hardware. Is that because it's just too old for XP to remember it, do you think? The scanner appears to be alive, lights up makes appropriate starting up sort of noises, but the PC just plays snooty.
Any ideas. Wouldn't it be great if we could work this out and get them both functioning. Like getting a steam-loclmotive to move again after 50 years on the scrap-heap!
Steve

Life...It's difficult not to take it personally.

http://www.crab.org.uk

http://hostinthepost.co.uk

http://malawi-youth.org

 

[ian20x]

I couldn't belive it last night when I was just about to give up and go to bed, I got it working!

I've hooked my Saphire Ultra up using a SCSI connection and my PC is running Windows XP (SP2). I used the trial version of the scanner utility from

http://www.hamrick.com

(which I'm now going to buy) and XP found some driver for the scanner which I was particularly pleased with.

I don't know how familiar you are with everything but here's what I can remember from last night:

Try doing the following:
1. Install you SCSI card and check its functioning properly (Start>control panel>system>hardware>device manager>SCSI & RAID controllers).
2. Connect all your cables up.
3. Switch the scanner on an wait until its finished doing its warm up stuff.
4. boot up your computer (or reboot it if already running) as SCSI devices need to be present during BOOT up.
5. Right click my computer and select manage. Locate your SCSI card under the device manager and then right click selecting scan for hardware changes (I think XP then detected the scanner and when through the usual install stuff and I just selected automatically install drivers which it did).
6. Install the software from

http://www.hamrick.com/

if not already install.
7. SCAN

Let me know how you get on. Think that was all I did.

I managed to scan an old B&W negative of my grandfather attending an IEE conference regarding the first British electric trains. Just another piece of history from the film

 

[smiffy47]

That is good news! You must be delighted.
And thanks for all the technical info. I've noticed that you call your scanner "Ultra". It worries me that I don't recall seeing the word on my model .. but I mustn't be too pessimistic.
When I was connecting up scanner to PC I was just using the 25 pin connection from the scanner to similar on the PC (described as Parallel Port). Is this not going to work? Will I need to buy a scsi card, do you think?
With the success you've had I think I might just be making a visit to the garage, but not tonight. It's too late for all that mylarky.
Happy Scanning, and goodnight,
Steve. UK

Life...It's difficult not to take it personally.

http://www.crab.org.uk

http://hostinthepost.co.uk

http://malawi-youth.org

 

[ian20x]

From what I've read, the 25 pin socket is an Apple Mac connection. I've not seen any support for this on the PC.

I bought the following items to connect mine up:
SCSI cable

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI....MEWN:IT&viewitem=&item=300090762900&rd=1&rd=1

SCSI card

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI....MEWN:IT&viewitem=&item=180096101342&rd=1&rd=1

The other night when I thought the SCSI idea wasn't going to work, I placed a bid on the following. Its a USB to SCSI adaptor which is supported by VueScan. Feel free to outbid me know as I don't need it any more. For the sake of £5 or so its probably worth it:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI....MEBI:IT&viewitem=&item=190096631465&rd=1&rd=1

The next stage on my scanning adventure is to make a template to hold my negatives to scan 8 at a time (there's several hundred or thousand- I don't know). Then I'm going to write some script to power Photoshop to get it to cut the individual negatives out of the scanned image and save them. Think the catalogueing is going to be a bit of a pain. Then I can bung the hole lot on DVD-video and finally people will get to see these long lost images!