Wednesday, September 10, 2014

My Conversation With a Scanner

       I have many slides and photos which I have been thinking about scanning. I've really only been thinking about it. You know, "It would be nice to scan them."

       My friend Mitch has a scanner and he offered it to me to scan my slides. Now Mitch bought the scanner a few years ago and never used it. He said I could figure out how to use it and tell him what to do.

     Well, first with the scanner you have to load the program and drivers from a disk. So click icon the scanner icon and we should be in business. You guessed it. I got messages that the camera couldn't be found. I uninstalled and installed again and nothing happened. I looked for help on the Internet. It sounded pretty bleak. 


The miserable beast!


    Well, my number one plan when dealing with stress...leave it for a while.

    A few days ago I was looking in the "all programs" on the left of the computer screen and I saw "image scan tool". I thought, "What is this? Could it be the scanner?" So click and yes the page came up that gave me the scanner and processing the slides. Wow! What blundering luck!

    I scanned one photo and the thing went dead. Several more attempts and the scanner dies. Aha, this thing needs more power so I unplugged the web cam. Now the scanner stays on and I can follow the page the find out what to do.

     There's a manual, but it tells very little . Once I discovered some things by trial and error , I went back to the manual and things made sense. The manual doesn't help as far as instructions are concerned.

    I scanned some slides . The product was terrible. I would not keep anything so poor. So I still have more to do. I have to find out how the calibration of the image tool works.

    So I've been having a rather poor conversation with a scanner. I've learned some things. I think one has to buy a much better quality scanner if you want acceptable results.

    How have you found scanners? Frustrating? Awesome?