LaserSoft Imaging

Whilst testing the latest 6.5.5r2, I was shocked to see that it is *still* not a Universal Binary, my Intel Mac shows that whilst "Silverfast Universal Launcher" is running Intel native, "Silverfast Universal" and "sssfdexe" are PowerPC binaries.

Intel chips were announced June 2005, and on the streets in Jan 2006.... the development tools for making Universal Binaries were available in 2005, almost 2 years now.... come on guys....

This is not cheap software, I think we deserver better support than this...

Dear DJ

what is it that does not work on your system?

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

What an ignorant and arrogant reply.

What an ignorant and arrogant reply.

I have to agree and to have come from LSI directly. Hard to believe, really.

I wanted to read this thread because I wanted to know about when a universal binary version would be available. I was going to buy a paid upgrade to Silverfast but found out it was not "UB". My plan is to wait until the UB is available and then (and ONLY then) pay for an upgrade.

Now that I see a reply direct from an LSI employee that in effect says "we don't care" I'm wondering what other options I have. Maybe a workflow that imports 16-bit color TIFF files using the Epson supplied software and then doing the corrections that I would have done in SF in CS3.

Now to answer the question"what's wrong?" From an end user's point of view the worst thing about doing your own scans is the TIME it takes. A universal binary scanner driver might cut minutes off each job and hours off of a project. And then there is the memory requirement. Rosetta takes up a bit of RAM and that has an effect on other tasks running on the computer.

Practical concerns. No one wants to pay for an upgrade twice. I'll wait for the Universal Binary and then buy the upgrade only once.

I've signed up to the mailing list and I figure eventually I'll read about a UB version of Silverfast and then I'll come back and concider upgrading.

I was going to ask if a Linux port was on the cards :lol: I guess not judging by this response to an existing 'supported' platform.

Dear DJ

I am sorry to see that I have aggravated you. Please except my sincerest apologies. My intention had been far from what I seem to have been understood.
I was honestly caring about what problems do arise because of the state of the individual SilverFast sub programs, so that I can see what I can achieve of your behalf at LaserSoft Imaging internally.
I really feel awfully that I have been got so wrong.

Truly sorry
Sonny Noack
- Manager Technical Support, LaserSoft Imaging AG -

I'm not sure why you think it was me you may have aggravated, I have not responded since your reply to my original post, though I cannot speak for these other posters, and whilst I do share some of their sentiment, I personally think they ( one in particular ) are a little harsh....

So to be clear, I am not aggravated by your response, just extremely disappointed.

I'm afraid to say Silverfast has a very poor reputation for support response ( especially from the EU offices ), this is what I discovered from various mailing lists/forums on the net, and sadly from my own experience. When I asked around in the community before buying, the impression I got of Silverfast support was simply "there isn't any". I get the feeling ( and I know I'm not alone in this ) that customer support requests and questions fall on deaf ears, or are ignored completely. The fact it has taken three months for this thread to be noticed again is somewhat indicative of that. I once phoned up Lasersoft for support in purchasing a license, and was told by recorded message that the offices were closed for Christmas. I phoned in May...

I have just checked your latest release ( 6.5.5r4 ) and I note that it is still a PowerPC only binary. Apple haven't sold a machine with a PowerPC processor since Q3 2006...

When I consider my ( Howtek ) copy of Silverfast Ai Studio cost as much as a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3, I've no option but to feel disappointed that Lasersoft hasn't even bothered to switch to the right compiler yet.

I have offered my help, if I bring up issues I try to be constructive and to provide feedback which may be of help with bug testing and trying new versions, but no response. To be clear, my version of Silverfast does run, albeit under emulation ( Rosetta ). I'm slightly disappointed it is taking so long to bring the full product line up to Leopard compatibility, but I fully understand this is a long process as you support so many models, and my scanner will be added eventually, however, the simple lack of a Universal Binary in 2008 is very poor. It gives the impression you just don't care.

I realise the majority of Silverfast's income will almost certainly come from OEMs from the bundling of Silverfast with their scanners, and those will be your primary focus for version updates, however, those of us who have independently purchased expensive licenses for your software deserve a little better support I feel, I'm sure I'm not alone.

I hope you'll reconsider the importance of a positive support response to your customers.

Whoa... I think you (Belos) should cut Sonny some slack here. Or maybe you'd like to try corresponding with him in German ? I assume you're a native English speaker (or an America, which is nearly the same thing) who is projecting his (or her?) culture on the whole world. Seems to me Sonny asked a pertinent question. Why, indeed, should Silverfast be rewritten for UB when it works fine in emulation ? It took Microsoft long enough to update Office, and they have, I think, a few more resources than Lasersoft.

I daresay it will be released as a UB when appropriate. The Rosetta overhead is quite negligible, and the overall performance has far more to do with the scanner and the data connection than anything that UB would do. Maybe the UI would be a bit snappier, but frankly, I don't see that as an issue.

On the other hand, the ME function has hugely speeded up my workflow, as it gives my identical IQ to 8 or even 16 pass multisampling. I'd rather Lasersoft spent resources on developing and fine tuning that sort of stuff, rather than playing catch up with the whims of Apple.

Any chance we'll see a Universal Binary before Apple drop support for PowerPC architecture? ( as rumoured for "Snow Leopard" ).

I hate to labour the point, but the tools for compiling as a Universal Binary have been available since 2005...

Just read thru these, looking to see if SilverFast's upgrade to 6.5 or 6.6 for Mac was 'rosetta free'. Apparently they are not.

I wanted to respond to drm's statement:

Why, indeed, should Silverfast be rewritten for UB when it works fine in emulation ? It took Microsoft long enough to update Office, and they have, I think, a few more resources than Lasersoft

In my experience since upgrading to Leopard with a Quad-Core Intel Mac running Photoshop CS4... Rosetta slows things down noticably. For example, opening files and accessing "File Info" for photo credits is dog-slow in Rosetta.

So I've turned off Rosetta and now access SilverFast (6.4.4r6) thru SF Launcher.

As noted on this board, there really is no reason for me to upgrade until this issue is fixed.

One other comment: Since when do we hold Microsoft up as the paradigm of customer support?

I'm starting to feel like I'm flogging a dead horse here, but... is there some kind of anti universal-binary sentiment at Lasersoft?

Having just installed the latest ( 6.6.0r6 ) I find that even the Epson V750 version is still running PowerPC binaries, nevermind my less popular Howtek version.

Snow Leopard has been announced yesterday to be released in September, notably "for Intel Macs". Developer versions of Snow Leopard released were Intel-Only and there is no PowerPC support, with no confirmation yet whether PowerPC support will be added back in for the retail release ( unlikely as Apple haven't made PowerPC machines since January 2006 ).

Suggestions on this board also that Lasersoft is working on the "next major release, which will be a Universal Binary". Does this mean that current versions will not be made Universal Binary and we will need to pay to get a UB version? Suffice to say that I will be very annoyed if I am forced to pay for 2006 technology in 2009/2010. I don't mind paying to upgrade for new features, but I do mind paying to get overdue 4 year old compatibility updates. The tools for making Universal Binaries were available in 2005... Even Adobe managed to update the entire CS suite by 2007.

I'm trying to be nice about this, I don't want to be confrontational, but this issue has been met with stony silence or complete indifference.

My Howtek Ai Studio sells at 658 Euros, this is not cheap software, and I'm afraid I can no longer pretend this is an acceptable level of support. Please Lasersoft, show us that you actually care.

Dear Customer,

I know you are all waiting eagerly for a new universal binary version of SilverFast.
But let us conclude why universal binarys are a good thing, it is because of increasing the performance on Intel Macs.

We absolutely agree with that so we already use universal code for many performance critical operations inside SilverFast, this is something we started a year ago to eliminate bottlenecks and make use
of the improved equipment of our customers. In the latest Version we actually do support all 8 cores of the new MacPro I think this is quite an achievement.
For Snow Leopard we are actually testing SilverFast with every new developer release Apple publishes to make SilverFast work smoothly with Snow Leopard when it is released.

As you already mentioned of course we are working on a complete rewrite at the moment but this will still take a while.

LSI_Luebker wrote:But let us conclude why universal binarys are a good thing, it is because of increasing the performance on Intel Macs.

Actually, I don't think performance is the major issue with the need for a Universal Binary at all, I imagine most Silverfast users are already quite happy with the speed of the application ( I have no real problems with the speed ), no, I suspect the major need for a Universal Binary of Silverfast is COMPATIBILITY. We've now seen PowerPC dropped by Apple, Snow Leopard hits the streets tomorrow ( Aug 28th 2009 ) and will not run on PowerPC machines, and does not include the Rosetta emulator as part of the standard install.

This means Silverfast, as it currently stands will not work on a standard Snow Leopard installation. Those of us who rely on Silverfast are effectively locked out of using Snow Leopard, and Snow Leopard users are locked out of using Silverfast. Your product has been almost obsoleted because you've steadfastly ignored this issue for over 4 years.

It is rumoured that Rosetta will be included with Snow Leopard as an optional install, but not yet confirmed. It is also not confirmed what effect Rosetta will have on the newer subsystems of Snow Leopard, and if it's installation will negate the optimisations of the new OS.

LSI_Luebker wrote:In the latest Version we actually do support all 8 cores of the new MacPro I think this is quite an achievement.

It's a great achievment, however, I believe your efforts are mis-focused. Making the application super-fast is fine, but not at the expensive of compatibility. I think your paying customers would rather know you spent your time ensuring the application would actually run on a current system, than scraping a few more % of performance from it.

LSI_Luebker wrote:For Snow Leopard we are actually testing SilverFast with every new developer release Apple publishes to make SilverFast work smoothly with Snow Leopard when it is released. As you already mentioned of course we are working on a complete rewrite at the moment but this will still take a while.

Which presumably means we will have to pay for an upgrade to Silverfast 6.7 or 7.0 to obtain a 4 year old compatibility update? That's not going to please a lot of people...

DJ wrote:

LSI_Luebker wrote:But let us conclude why universal binarys are a good thing, it is because of increasing the performance on Intel Macs.

Actually, I don't think performance is the major issue with the need for a Universal Binary at all, I imagine most Silverfast users are already quite happy with the speed of the application ( I have no real problems with the speed ), no, I suspect the major need for a Universal Binary of Silverfast is COMPATIBILITY. We've now seen PowerPC dropped by Apple, Snow Leopard hits the streets tomorrow ( Aug 28th 2009 ) and will not run on PowerPC machines, and does not include the Rosetta emulator as part of the standard install.

This means Silverfast, as it currently stands will not work on a standard Snow Leopard installation. Those of us who rely on Silverfast are effectively locked out of using Snow Leopard, and Snow Leopard users are locked out of using Silverfast. Your product has been almost obsoleted because you've steadfastly ignored this issue for over 4 years.

It is rumoured that Rosetta will be included with Snow Leopard as an optional install, but not yet confirmed. It is also not confirmed what effect Rosetta will have on the newer subsystems of Snow Leopard, and if it's installation will negate the optimisations of the new OS.

We tested SilverFast with all developer releases of Snow Leopard to ensure that it will work smoothly with the new OS and this is the case now.
Rosetta is an optional install on 10.6 and Snow Leopard will automatically display a notification message when installing an application that does require rosetta and install it automatically if needed.

DJ wrote:

LSI_Luebker wrote:In the latest Version we actually do support all 8 cores of the new MacPro I think this is quite an achievement.

It's a great achievment, however, I believe your efforts are mis-focused. Making the application super-fast is fine, but not at the expensive of compatibility. I think your paying customers would rather know you spent your time ensuring the application would actually run on a current system, than scraping a few more % of performance from it.

LSI_Luebker wrote:For Snow Leopard we are actually testing SilverFast with every new developer release Apple publishes to make SilverFast work smoothly with Snow Leopard when it is released. As you already mentioned of course we are working on a complete rewrite at the moment but this will still take a while.

Which presumably means we will have to pay for an upgrade to Silverfast 6.7 or 7.0 to obtain a 4 year old compatibility update? That's not going to please a lot of people...

The useres of SilverFast 6.5 and 6.6 will have the opportunity to upgrade to the Universal Binary Version of SilverFast with a special discount

What special discount is that to upgrade?
Shouldn't it be a free upgrade for the users?

For us to pay more for the upgrade won't be a good idea for the consumers.