LaserSoft Imaging

Hello,

I see your marketing makes lots of noise about HDRi and iSRD for Nikon scanners, then burries the dirty truth about limited support in the fine print .

I have boxes and boxes of kodachrome slides, Coolscan V ED, Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit, and of course nikon scan. Nikon have announced some time ago that they are not supporting Vista 64 bit, so by extension it is a pretty safe bet Win 7 64 bit is also not happening.

Now your marketing makes lots of claims about how your iSRD is better than ICE, so please make iSRD available for Win 7 64 and nikon scanners. Your marketing also indicates iSRD is the ideal kodachrome scratch/dirt solution.

Yes I have read you use nikon MAID drivers for windows, but that hasn't stopped you with developing your own drivers for mac. How about applying the knowledge gained with mac implementation to windows ?

When will Lasersoft do HDRi / iSRD for the Nikon / Windows combo ?

No silverfast here yet, have money, will spend....... on a suitable product.

Regards

John Alderson

jsa wrote:Hello,

I see your marketing makes lots of noise about HDRi and iSRD for Nikon scanners, then burries the dirty truth about limited support in the fine print .

I have boxes and boxes of kodachrome slides, Coolscan V ED, Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit, and of course nikon scan. Nikon have announced some time ago that they are not supporting Vista 64 bit, so by extension it is a pretty safe bet Win 7 64 bit is also not happening.

Now your marketing makes lots of claims about how your iSRD is better than ICE, so please make iSRD available for Win 7 64 and nikon scanners. Your marketing also indicates iSRD is the ideal kodachrome scratch/dirt solution.

Yes I have read you use nikon MAID drivers for windows, but that hasn't stopped you with developing your own drivers for mac. How about applying the knowledge gained with mac implementation to windows ?

When will Lasersoft do HDRi / iSRD for the Nikon / Windows combo ?

No silverfast here yet, have money, will spend....... on a suitable product.

Regards

John Alderson

Dear Mr. Alsderson ,

as you have correctly pointed out we would need to completely rewrite the Low level driver for all the Nikon Scanners for the Windows platform and this does take a considerable amount of development time as well as lots of quality testing and bug fixing. We are aware of the customer demand for a iSRD Version of SilverFast for Windows.

I would say it would at least take 6 Month, but in the current stage it is really hard to tell an exact date.

p.s. our company name is LaserSoft Imaging not Lasersoft just to avoid confusion.

Hi!
I can just agree, I am waiting for a windows version for Nikon HDRi...

/Anders

I would say it would at least take 6 Month, but in the current stage it is really hard to tell an exact date.

This answer I get more than six month ago. So, the development is ready in near future, or it has not started ??

cu, Stehohrhase

Dear Stehohrhase

Stehohrhase wrote:This answer I get more than six month ago. So, the development is ready in near future, or it has not started ??

Not true, my colleague wrote this message on March 15 2010, plus he never stated this would be a work in progress, he simply gave an estimate of how long the writing of this new driver might take.

We are still evaluating the feasibility of this project in the near future.

Thank you for your patience and especially for your understanding

Cheers

Waiting 6-12 months is way too long for a product that is already fairly expensive.
The adage "Time is money" works both ways. I'm wasting my money either waiting on you to release this for Windows 7 or by buying Apple/MAC stuff. Please don't strong-arm, taunt, or alienate the PC market segment by not releasing MAC/PC versions simultaneously (or nearly).

ttilton wrote:Waiting 6-12 months is way too long for a product that is already fairly expensive.
The adage "Time is money" works both ways. I'm wasting my money either waiting on you to release this for Windows 7 or by buying Apple/MAC stuff. Please don't strong-arm, taunt, or alienate the PC market segment by not releasing MAC/PC versions simultaneously (or nearly).

Dear ttilton,

the important point is that the Mac version was developed earlier simply because the Nikon Framework, that was used by us, was not supporting OS X versions after 10.4 nor Intel Macs and Nikon stoped the development. So In order to provide our Mac customers with a working version of SilverFast for the current Hardware and OS Generation we needed to develop our own lowlevel driver otherwise they would not have been able to use their Nikon Scanner at all.

On Windows we currently have a stable running Nikon version that does even run on Windows 7 64Bit. We really understand that you are all eagerly waiting for a iSRD capabal version of SilverFast for Nikon on Windows but we actually have to rewrite the whole lowlevel driver for gaining this capability. So the timeframe Allejandro gave is as much as we can say right now.

Please could you explain how vu*scan is able to import the IR channel using the Nikon driver?

By the way, this software package is faaaar cheaper than your product.
You advertise your product to be _only_ professional scan software to justify professional prices.

On the other hand, your products do not support features that can be found in competing products:
Such as:
Import of the IR channel
support for TIFF compression

Dear feuchtgr.

feuchtgr wrote:Please could you explain how vu*scan is able to import the IR channel using the Nikon driver?

That software does not use the Nikon driver because it is incompatible with windows 7. It has its own low level driver to communicate with the scanner.

That is also the reason why it is clearly stated in their website, they do not offer any guarantee or assume any liability in case you equipment is damaged in the process (which by the way, already happened to few of our Nikon customers after installing the software in question).

LaserSoft Imaging on the other hand by using the Nikon driver are bound to license agreements and patents of other companies (which is the reason why we can not access that information of the infrared channel under Windows).

I hope this helps clear the perspective of what happens behind the scenes.

Thanks for your understanding.

Best regards

Dear all,
please let me restate the facts from the Development view. Although my colleagues stated the facts correctly i may can put it in a different perspective.
( and may not ):

-In the beginning of Nikon support we adressed all Nikon scanners native on both Mac & PC

-Then Nikon invented the MAID driver structure and from that moment Nikon "strongly motivated" us to use MAID ( beginning with the LS2000 ) on Mac & PC

-Later on when Nikon did no driver development anymore it turned out that the MAID drivers had some malfunctions on the later OSX versions while they worked fine on PC.
---> So we had a NOGO situation on the Mac and as we then were free again NOT to use the MAID drivers anymore we decided to invest the resources to develop a native solution for OSX while this was not neccessary on the PC as the MAID drivers still worked fine there.

-With the addition of HDRi & iSRD we got in the current situation:
---> Now the OSX useres were better off in terms of dust removal quality AND infrared archive capabilities then the PC users so there is a demand from the PC users to have the same (voiced over and over in this thread).

-As we are currently working on some other rewrites facing the other challenges we have ( multicore hardware & new 64 Bit operating systems beeing widely popular now ) we have to adress those things first.

We also have to care FIRST for scanner users whose scanners do not function at all with the new operating systems. ( Please note that we cared quite fast for PC Nikon users whose scanners were not working under 64 Bit systems ).
And THEN we will deal with (re-) adding wanted features like making HDRi and iSRD available for Nikon users.
That is why the timeframe is a bit unclear for us as the other tasks have to be adressed first. I assume that we indeed solve the Nikon-iSRD & HDRi problems before the end of the year ...


I hope that explains our position well enough to understand our fuzzy timeframe for Nikon iSRD support


Greetings,

Nils Heidorn, R & D, LSI AG

Hello Nils,

Thanks for posting an update.

I'm dissapointed to see it is still yet another six months.

Looking back through the forums I see people requesting HDRi and iSRD for Windows/Nikon scanners, since its announcement for Mac. That is now years in terms of time frame.

The great majority of replies by LSI staff have been '6 months', so we are sick of hearing another six months and so the frustration is coming out in the forum.

Moderate all you like, your not fooling us end users, just limiting the chance for prospective customers to express demand for a certain feature set.

Your forum moderation will just send people away from your product, possibly never to return.

I for one won't buy your product in the 'hope' of an upgrade that delivers the HDRi iSRD vapourware to Windows for Nikon scanners. I think many others are the same.

Regards
John Alderson

Dear John,
i am exactly NOT trying to fool users, i am trying to be honest and to explain why it might look that we are fooling users.
No one expects you to buy now in the hope of beeing able to upgrade to a version you REALLY want later.
The version you CAN buy now does what it promises and it does it well, later versions will do more.
This simple statement is true for almost any piece of software, for reasons stated above we can not commit to a clear timeframe when which version will do this or that...
It might be less then 6 month until your demands are met or it might be more but as i tried to be honest i will not give you unwarranted timeframes no matter how hard you press.
And it would gain you little too

So: Please buy the current version if it does what you need or buy a future version if it does what you want and be assured that there will be profitable upgrade pathes to follow but at no time you should buy a current version that you cannot use.

Its simple as that !

Greetings,

Nils Heidorn, R & D, LSI AG

P.S. if beeing honest drives away users then that is another lesson we have to learn. I hope not.

One simple proposal:

If you will add some day HDRi capability for windows, please enable your software to choose which driver it should use:

- the native Nikon driver (if installed; without HDRi capability)
OR
- your driver supporting HDRi.

In this case, the user will be able to choose his preferred driver. Of course there will be differences between your driver and the nikon MAID. Probably, Nikon knows its own scanners better than any other company and therefore, in some cases, their own driver might deliver better results.

Dear John,

The driver is chosen by the operating system, not SilverFast.
Windows can always only use a single driver for each device.

kind regards
Arne Ketelhohn.

I'm not an expert on Windows Driver Development, but the Nikon Driver delivered with Nikon Scan 4.03 works under Windows Vista 64bit. It seams that only the .inf file deliverd by Nikon is not useable by 64bit Windows. A solution is provided here. I'm using this soulution right now and have seen so far no drawback. Neither with Nikon Scan 4.0.3 nor with Silverfast. At several places is reported that this solution works also on Windows 7 64bit. So possibly you want to give it a try.

But this does not help using HDRi on Windows if the Nikon driver does not support a way of exporting the infrared channel.

I'm working since more than 20 year in the software industry and with this background I could not follow the argument that it needs 6 and more month to develop the driver to release needed to support HDRi on Windows including all the reasonable quality checks if there is allready a version accessing the same hardware under Mac OS. It may be a question of priorisation as indicated by LSI_Heidorn. But since I have seen 2Mio line of code projects ready to release in 14 month by 4 developers (including all the quality checks!) it is more a question of ambition wanting a few hundert lines of code in place in a month time.

I agree fully that it is unacceptable for a professional solution not stating the time frame when a certain function will be available on a certain platform when it is allready available on another platform. If I look in the LaserSoft Shop for the price of Silverfast Archive Suite, I could see that it is below the price for Silverfast Ai Studio. So obvious none could see the additional benefit of an Archive Suite if I could not archive all information that is scanned and HDRi is for this reason not available.

So the question from professional to professional remains clearly: when will HDRi and iSRD be available on Windows?

Rgds

:-glup