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The SCSI Film Scanner Resurrection
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cm0002 suppo.fi cm0002@suppo.fi
Joined: 2025-11-10
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[Ronan] likes 35mm film photography, but the world, of course, has gone digital. He picked up an Epson FilmScan 200 for about €10. This wonder device from 1997 promised to convert 35mm film to digital at 1200 DPI resolution. But there was a catch: it connects via SCSI. Worse, the drivers were forever locked to Windows 95/98 and Mac System 7/8.

In a surprise twist, though, [Ronan] recently resurrected a Mac SE/30 with the requisite SCSI port and the System 7 OS. Problem solved? Not quite. The official software is a plugin for Photoshop. So the obvious answer is to write new software to interact with the device.

First, of course, you have to figure out how the device works. A service manual provided clues that, as far as the SCSI bus knew, the device wasn’t a scanner at all, but a processor. The processor, though, used SCSI as a simple pipe to handle Epson’s standard “ESC/I” protocol.

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TropicalDingdong lemmy.world TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-07-29
#2 · Quote Reply

SCSI

I remember it being pronounced "skuzzy"

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Visstix lemmy.world Visstix@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-06-17
#3 · Quote Reply

Why not get a modern scanner that scans higher resolution?
Just wondering what this does better.

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villainy lemmy.world villainy@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-07-03
#4 · Quote Reply

SCSI I remember it being pronounced "skuzzy"

You remember correctly, but also

Almost a full day was devoted to agreeing to name the standard "Small Computer System Interface", which Boucher intended to be pronounced "sexy", but ENDL's Dal Allan pronounced the new acronym as "scuzzy" and that stuck.

Wikipedia

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