Canon FS4000 USB to SCSI

I've had the Canon FS400 scanner for some time. My only complaint was

that is slow. I've read on several news groups that the USB interface

leaves much to be desired and that the SCSI interface is much better.

So, yestreday I bought a Adaptec 2930CU and a very expensive 50 pin

cable. i installed everything reinstall scanner software, rebooted my

PC and scanned in a couple sildes. It looks as if there's no change.

Still takes about 5-6 mintues per frame.

 

Is this normal? Has anybody seen a change between the two?

I use the USB on my office computer (1.6gHz P4 1GIG RAM) and the SCSI on my home computer (233MHz P1 256Mb RAM) and can't see any difference though a full-res scan doesn't take anywhere near 5 minutes on either one.

I only used it with SCSI and Vuescan and it takes less than 5 minutes. I heared that Vuescan is faster than FilmGet, so you might want to try that.

My FS4000 takes about 2-3 minutes for a 4000 dpi scan with FARE when using SCSI. Before, with USB, my scans took about 10 minutes with the same settings. I do all my scanning with FilmGet.

 

How fast is your computer? How much RAM do you have? It's possible your system is bottlenecking in your PC--especially if you use FARE, which is CPU-intensive.

I just scanned a 35mm Kodachrome slide in my FS4000 at 4000 dpi (ppi?) and 24 bit color in 4 minutes and 5 seconds.

I first set my FS4000 up on USB because I originally had an old SCSI-1 interface card, and the scanner wouldn't function with it. I then installed a used Adaptec AHA-2840UW, and the scanner took off running much faster. I didn't measure the difference, but it seems to be at least two or three times faster than on USB.

When talking about USB I would like to point out that there is now two different generations of USB cables/interfaces. For what I learned this saturday, visiting a computer shop, there is USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 versions. A new computer would probably use 2.0 wich also would be as fast as the SCSI connection. For what I understand the important side of the USB connections is on the computerside wich need to accept the newer 2.0 version.

 

Maybe this is why some people does not see any differens between usb/scsi and some do?

 

 

( please not that 2.0 needs the new USB cable, wich looks exactly like the old, just to confuse things even more.... )

regards

Peter

Besides speed, an advantage of SCSI is that it has very little impact on the CPU or your PC, which is not the case of USB. With SCSI, I can work and tweak a previous scan while vuescan is scanning, which I could not really do with USB. I mentioned Vuescan, but it could be anything else, as long as it's not the 'scan/acquire' option of your image processing software.

Hi.... As Bernhard Mayr mentioned, vuescan is faster. I was using the filmget software from within photoshop with usb2 and changed to vuescan. The result was a much faster scan speed. I've not timed them, but on my system I would guess that for 4000dpi scans vuescan is getting on for twice as fast as equivalent filmget. I'd also say that vuescan is giving me better quality scans than fimget (I should mention that I am working pretty much exclusively in Black and White) and allows me to edit images in photoshop at the same time as scanning.

 

Tim.......

I have a 600 meg PC with 512Meg of memory.

The FS4000 doesn't support USB2, so having USB2 on the computer won't help the scanning speed. If you monitor your CPU usage during scanning and see it going to 100%, then your PC is likely the bottleneck.

Where can I get Vuescan and how do I make it work in place of Filmget?

Anthony, I downloaded Vuescan direct from the internet: http://www.hamrick.com/

 

It runs as a stand alone program, so just run it and follow the instructions, it will operate compleatly independently of filmget and of photoshop.

I bought an Adaptec 2930CU for the same reason and on my system it made a big speed difference. I think something's wrong. (Sorry to have to give bad news.)