Heidelberg scanners

[macmanjim]

It would be nice if Silverfast supported heidelberg scanners in OS X such as the Quickstep as heidelberg has no plans to support X. I have two clients that bought that scanner and now it is useless since they upgraded to OS X. I am sure there are many other people supporting and owning Heidelberg scanners in the same boat.

[Paul Escudier]

I agree, apart from no OSX support Linocolor has grown from a nice piece of software when it first appeared, into a complete jumbled mess. Their customer support is awful, and I must say when I see people complaining about the price of Silverfast it makes me chuckle as they obviosly have no experience of Heidelberg!

After downloading many demos of Silverfast I finally found that the PFU 2400DL works with my Circon, although it only supports two of the lenses (2400ppi and 800ppi), also autofocus doesn't work, despite these drawbacks I bought a copy and have been running it for over a year now.

I thoroughly agree, their must be many people owning Circons / Quicksteps who would love the oppotunity to run them on Silverfast. They are essentialy excellent scanners with great optics, let down by a company who doesn't care for their customers. I personally know of three such machines that now lay idle, unused and unloved, as Linocolour has finally driven their owners into the arms of new (lesser quality) machines.

Come on Silverfast "Save Our Circons" (and Quicksteps) you are our only hope!

[LSI_Flyvbjerg]

Paul.

You are right, the SilverFast module for PFU DL2400 works with the Cirson, since these two scanners are almost identical. The only difference is that the Circon has one more lens. The problem is that PFU will not tell us how to use this additional lens and therefore we cannot support it.

Macmanjim.

We are trying to get the Linotype scanners to work on OSX which also are supported on OS9, but we don?t know when it will be finished.

Eric.

[rayven]

I agree. I've got a Heidelberg Linoscan 2650 sitting here in OS 9. Heidelberg is trying to 'push the merits' of their software and telling me it is so 'wonderful' that it outweighs the need to push it into OS X. I've spent enough money on it to know I don't want a dead machine here. If Silverfast would support it, I would buy it in a second. I've read elsewhere about other Linoscan 2650 owners having the same non-response from Heidelberg as well. Silverfast would have a great little market just with all of us poor saps stuck with this high-priced end-of-the-road machines. They lied to me saying it would operate in Classic mode, but when it didn't and I inquired to tech support, they stated it didn't run in classic at all.

Anyone know if any Silverfast product works with the Linoscan 2650?

[Paul Escudier]

I have just emailed Heidelberg as follows:

Seeing as you are providing no solution for people wishing to run their
Circon scanners on Mac OSX will you be releasing an SDK? I'm sure Laserfast would be willing to develop it's Silverfast software to support it if only you would release details. I really feel you owe it to your customers to do this and to do it quickly. There are many unhappy Circon owners unable to use their scanners, or having to use an outdated operating system to run them.
Regards,
Paul Escudier


Their reply completely avoided answering a straightforward question, (as ever), but I suggest all frustrated Heidelberg owners email them at the address below asking for them to release an SDK.

desktopscanners@de.heidelberg.com

Lets see if we can make them do the decent thing, after all, they took our money quick enough for the scanner, then made a packet out of upgrade fees for the software!

[VPTech]

I've just started doing some research to upgrade an old PowerMac to a newer Mac running OS X. But I've got a Linotype Saphir Ultra II and finding scanner software for it on OS X has been a real challenge.

Silverfast AI looks like an excellent product that will do just what I need. Alas, no OS X version for the LinoTypes.

But wait! A little more digging on the web turned up the fact that many of the Linotype scanners are virtually identical to various Umax models. For example, see http://www.image-acquire.com/scanner/re ... xpl3.shtml
and you'll find that the Saphir Ultra II is the same as a Umax PowerLook III. And further, you'll find an effort to develop standardized scanner interfaces for Unix variants called S.A.N.E. and they've published the following table of compatibility:
http://www.rauch-domain.de/sane-umax/sa ... s-doc.html

SF does provide OS X versions for Umax models. Is it possible the Umax version will run the Linotype scanners? Can anyone try this and confirm?

John Lock
VP, Technology
Relevant Arts, Inc.

[ilyons]

John,

you can it for yourslef by downloading one of the UMAX compatible demo versions of SilverFast.

Ian

[Paul Escudier]

I see Silverfast is now supporting the 2400xl and the 2650. The Circon is also listed but no demo available as yet.

When can we expect to see a demo for the Circon ? If you need someone to Beta test it please let me know.

Thanks to all at Silverfast once more for listening to what your customers actually want, keep up the great work.

Regards,

Paul

[kimwilliamson]

We have a Circon running the Linocolor 5.1.3 suite, but we're in 8.6 still. What we'd like to do is leap to OS X, of course, but Heidelberg says that, unless you want to hack it (which apparently is possible), even Linocolor 6 will run no higher than OS 9. However, I've received a couple sends re: their Newcolor software that is supposed to be OS X compliant but at last word was still in beta; I've no information on when/if that might be released and whether it would run Circon or other Linocolor scanners.

I saw today on creativepro.com that SilverFast now supports quite a few of the Heidelberg scanners, but when you go to the Circon support page at silverfast.com it's still "n/a". Of course what we're looking for is full, not partial, support for running the Circon in OS X, so if anyone on forum or at LaserSoft has info on when the Circon might be officially fully supported I'd love to hear it at kimw@boxoffice.com.

[LSI_Support]

Dear all,

today the circon scanner arrived in our HQ.

I think in 01.01.03 we support also the circon scanner

at our website (OSX)

greetings

Arne

[President_LSI]

SilverFast OS-X for Linotype Scanners

Dear Linotype Scanner Users,

we have been working hard to support all Linotype scanners to be OS-X compliant with SilverFast Ai 6. With regard to the Circon, we are about to find a way to control the extra lens to enable correct focussing. So I am sure a little bit of patience will be rewarded soon!

regards and
Merry Christmas!

Karl-Heinz Zahorsky