By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

It is nice to see such nice long articles from the members. That way I have to write very little to finishing filling the newsletter. In fact, if I had used 12 point type, the newsletter would probably already be full.

HP PhotoSmart Scanner Revisited In the August 1998 newsletter, http://www.tpcug.org/newsletter/august1998/photo_smart-scanner.htm, I wrote about getting a 35 mm negative and slide scanner. In the December 2001 newsletter, http://www.tpcug.org/newsletter/nl_2001/december2001/new_computer.htm, I wrote about moving that scanner from a Windows 98 computer to a Windows Me computer and the problems I had in doing that. For Windows Me I had to get a new SCSI card and the new scanning software from HP. But I got it working and did a bit of scanning with it. However, I don’t do that much scanning anymore since most of my photos are now taken with my Canon PowerShot G1 digital camera, which I have had for almost two years. But I have many, many black and white negatives, color slides and color negatives that I would like to archive digitally. I scanned in a number of them for my web site and other uses, but I hadn’t done a systematic scanning in of everything.

Several weeks back I decided to begin that project. I would scan in the negatives and slides using the PhotoSmart scanner connected to my second computer while doing my normal work on my main computer, which is right next to it. I started with black and white negatives from 1970 (I have earlier stuff than that). These negatives are ones I processed myself and were cut into lengths of 4. I immediately ran into a problem that I had encountered intermittently after installing the scanner on the Windows Me computer. At unpredictable intervals I would get the error message “Hpi_cntr has causes an error in HPI_IH.DLL” and the program would close. Start it back up, scan some number of negative strips, and the error would occur again. I never found a solution—until I moved on to later dated negatives that were cut in lengths of six negative frames to a strip. All of a sudden there were no more error messages.

I believe I know what caused the problem. The scanner is set to scan a maximum of five negative frames. On the strips of four, it sometimes couldn’t determine where the end of the fourth frame occurred due to sloppy work with scissors on my part, and that apparently caused the software to crash. When I moved to strips of six frames, it always could determine where the last frame was, in this case the fifth frame. So the problem is solved for negative strips longer than five frames, but what do you do for lengths of four or five. Well, there is no user setting for this, but you can go into the Windows registry and make the change there to either 4 or 3, whichever produces error free scanning.

I tired of negative scanning, put it away for awhile and moved on to some color slides. I scanned in about 270 and everything seemed to be going fine until I decided to take a close look at my results with Photoshop. Horrors. Under enlargement, they were out of focus with red or green borders around certain parts of the photo. And a random sample showed that all the slide scans were this way. I recalled having had this problem before, but couldn’t recall what the solution was other than to recalibrate the scanner. That did no good. Time for the Usenet newsgroup search on Google. I got nothing there—probably because I didn’t phrase the question correctly. Time to put a question to the rec.photo.digital newsgroup directly. I had my answer within a couple of hours from two different individuals. The solution: simply unplug the scanner from its power source for one minute and replug it and everything should be fine. It was. How simple, but I couldn’t recall it.

With all my problems I thought that I might need to buy a new scanner, but for the time being that does not seem necessary. A lucky observation and the Usenet newsgroups have made the old scanner usable, I am back to rescanning my color slides, and the results look good. But a new Nikon CoolScan IV was looking mighty nice—except for the $800 price. u