Silverfast is like a Mercedes of flim scanner's software

[RebBacchus]

It is a perfect example of why Mercedes failed at trying to make Chryslers and why I'll never buy another Mercedes... Which is not to say I'm ready to trash my investment in this software. I got rid of my Mercedes because it spent more time in the shop than on the road... not because it broke down but for the required maintenance!

Silverfast has a million controls but no way to process volume. If I wanted to spend four or five hours on each roll of film I shot I couldn't do better than this stuff. What I need is something that will take my great pictures and convert them to great digital images, in bulk!

I'm sure Silverfast could do everything I would ever want my scanner to do (Konica Minolta Elite 5400 II) to do... it just doesn't!

I tried last year to figure it out. I couldn't, gave up and scanned 13000 slides using the Minolta supplied software.

The manual is the worst sort of techno junk I've seen in a while and as a software designer who managed to retire at 43, fifteen years ago, that's saying something.

Now, I want to covert the 6-7K of negative I have into digital images. I've spent two days with this software trying to set up "Job manager" or batch mode to begin the task.

I even sent another note to tech support asking for directions --- No answer in 48 hours!

Now, having watched more movies, and pulled more manuals up on screen, spent more time that I want learning about controls I don't want to use, I thought I was ready to begin processing film.

I decided to use batch mode since "job manager" seems designed for flat bed scanners not mine. I made what I think are the right setting and I loaded my holder with six negatives.

Silverfast dutifully scanned frame # 1 six times. It was even smart enough to only leave one file on disk incremented to #6!

I really want to like this software, sigh another case of wasted money.

Here's a free suggestion. Give me simple controls that give me several "automatic setting." Let me scan my six pictures and work on them, if I need to (which I hope I don't) while the next batch is scanning! Simple and effective! Instead Job manager makes me work on the pre-scan while my scanner (the bottle neck of bulk scanning) sits idle!

Look, I know your market is for high end pros. However, there's a much bigger market for guys like me who never had a dark room but have one heck of a lot of slide or negative that we need to convert before they fade away. Make it simple and fast and you'll sell tons of software. In short keep your Mercedes for those who love to have their care tuned to perfection. For the rest of us give us a nice Lexus that needs nothing more than to have the oil changed every 3500 miles. Then write a simple manual to tell us what the "workflow" looks like.

Oh and I love the movie on Job manager that begins "Now that you have everything in the job manager...." If you ever made a movie telling us how to get them there I couldn't find it.


I probably won't be checking your forum. If you want to help drop me a note at my email address... you have it from the six or seven times I've had to register your software

Reb Bacchuis

[LSI_Noack]

Dear Reb

US support is managed by our office in Germany now, so "no answer" problems to your support requests won't happen anymore(?).

I agree with you concerning the distinction of different approaches towards software handling and market distinctions. On the same notion, I'm troubled to see that SilverFast sometimes - as in your case - fails to provide the ease of use you'd need to proceed your images most efficiently.

However, the example mentioned simply would have been remedied by settings > main dialogue > general > original > from: "transparency" to: "document feeder".
Usage:
Batchscanning "Transparency" will scan a number of frames from one prescan (typical flatbed batch mode).
Batchscanning "Document Feeder" will scan one frame from a number of 'documents', e.g. slides in a slider feeder unit / magazine or sheet of paper from a document tray (rather typical filmscanner and office scanner mode).

The JobManager is - as the other tools of SilverFast, too - located on the vertical button bar linkhand side of the preview window.

The solution / workflow you did wish for actually is implemented in SilverFast, but uses another approach:
(1) Scanning with SilverFast SE or Ai in an "HDR mode" (48 bit colour or 16 bit greyscale).
(2) Processing the images files with SilverFast HDR or DCPro.

Mass production would mean you would not use the JobManager, which is intended to work with a couple of images, but have specific settings with each of them.
Instead the batch mode is the thing to go with. But first, you'd want to save your settings on the frame tab of the main dialogue and make them default in the > Options > General panel. Or you'd activate "Auto by ADF" to use the automatic image adjustment tool for batchscanning (> Options > Auto).

Best regards
Sonny Noack
- Technical Support, LaserSoft Imaging AG -