Help with Kodak PCD 4050 Scanner

I just got a Kodak PCD 4050 scanner for the cost of shipping. I'm

trying to get it to work with the Mac Photoshop plug-in. Does anyone

at photo.net have experience with this scanner (perhaps former lab

employees)? There is no documentation available on line and Kodak

claims to have nobody left who knows anything about this scanner.

Help!

I worked with one years and years ago. What version of Photoshop? The plug in may or

may not work with anything newer that Photoshop 4 or 5 right off the bat.

I am using Photoshop Elements 1.01, which is supposed to work with Plug-ins. I've found an old copy of PS 5.0 for the Mac and expect to get it early next week. I now get a load error when I try to access the plug-in.

 

When I turn it on, the POWER light goes on and the fans operate, but the scanner does not seem to undergo any sort of mechanical initialization. The READY light remains off. What needs to happen to get the READY light to go on?

Larry,

 

Can you describe the features of the Kodak PCD 4050 and tell us why you bought that instead of a regular consumer scanner (aside from price)?

 

Thanks!

<a href="http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/kodak/kodak-appendices/form7.htm">Don Brown's Recommendations for Kodak Photo CD Scanning Process</a> gives a technical overview and some operational explanations of the Kodak 4050 PCD profession unit, but no diagnostic details. The thing weights 180 pounds, fwiw.

I have 6 Kodak PCD 4050 Scanners available if anyone is interested. Contact me at shaun@sunnking.com, 585.638.0095 ext. 22.

I've had one for almost a year. It was also given to me for the cost of shipping along with a Repri retouching workstation. It works with the Repri. Then I tried to get it to work with my Mac. I went round and round with Kodak on this, and eventually they no longer wanted to help.

 

The quality of the scans I've seen with these has always been real nice, and it scans fast. One minute for an 18 MB file and two minutes for the maximum 4000x6000 72 MB file.

 

I wish I could get mine to work with my Mac. Here is what I have gone through so far, at first the Mac would not even recognize the scanner. I read somewhere about Kodak scanners being finicky regarding SCSI. So I purchased an Adaptec 2906 SCSI card. Now the Mac recognizes the scanner.

 

However, in Photoshop 5 I receive some type of memory segmentation error (I haven't looked at it for awhile so don't remember the exact error message). With Photoshop 6 I receive "Could not load plugin" error messages. I've tried adjusting the memory usage but to no avail. With Photoshop 4 as I recall, it hung the machine or gave the same memory segmentation error as in PSD 5.

 

I've used Mac OS 8.1, 8.5, 8.6, and 9.1 - none of this seems to make any difference, the results are the same. Kodak had mentioned making sure that various CMS (Color?) system extensions were installed and they are.

 

Kodak said that this scanner will work with the G3 Turquise Mac, running OS 9.1, and using a FWB Jackhammer SCSI card. I looked into this and FWB no longer makes SCSI cards.

 

As this point I've been playing with loading and unloading of various system extensions, but have had no luck thus far. When I contacted Kodak a year ago, I was pretty persistent and eventually connected with someone who knew about this scanner, I don't recall the name, it doesn't matter as after about three emails they flat out told me that this was discontinued and would offer me no further help.

 

I'm about ready to turn this thing into a boat anchor. Its interesting to see this topic. Maybe we will get lucky and someone who KNOWS what to do will help us out.

Ronald,

 

Do you have the PCD 4050 software disks? I did manage to get mine running over the past few weeks. I bought a Jackhammer card on EBay and have been using OS 8.6.

Larry,

 

no I never received any software disks. Where can I find these? Also which Mac are you running on? Maybe I should try eBay to see if I can find the Jackhammer card. Or maybe I just need to locate the disks. Is this anything you can help me with? It would be great if I can get this to run on my Mac. I've got lots of chromes I'd like to scan. Let me know. Thanks!

One more thing,

 

I do have the Photoshop plugin, that can be downloaded from Kodak's web site. Is there other software required in addition to this?

Hi,

 

I got similar problem. Have PCD 4050, but Kodak website Photoshop plug-in cannot be found. Can anyone help? Any help greatly appreciated.

 

Armin.

I am also looking for the Photoshop plugin. Any help will be much appreciated. THX.