Minolta Elite 5400 pauses when setting resolution to 2700 or 5400

[aa2000]

Hello,

 

My scanner pauses the process (the holder is stoppig) 4-5 times

during a scan, when I set the resolution to 2700 or 5400 dpi. During

these pauses, the progress bar is still advancing, but the holder and

the step-by-step motor are freezed.

 

My PC motherboard is USB 1.1. I tought that's the cause (bandwith too

small to allow on-the-fly scaning and transfer data from the scanner

buffer to PC), so I purchased a cheap (no-name) USB 2.0 PCI card. I

connected my scanner to this card, but useless, the things are

exactely the same.

 

Are those pauses normal at 2700 and 5400? Or my new USB card is

unable to establish a 2.0 connection, and it is still in 1.1 mode?

 

Thanks in advance

[costas_lymbouris]

I use a 5400 on a USB2 interface driven by the motherboard chipset (it can make difference compared to a PCI card)and do not get the problem you describe.

 

However, the problem could be due to CPU usage, my CPU utilisation is usually 98% scanning with ICE on a 2.26 GHz processor. Might also be a memory problem, you may need more if you have less than 512Mbytes if you are not running the scan utility in stand alone mode - ie from an image editor.

[mike_zallini]

Mine pauses (or slows down) sometimes during scans. It seems to do it more if I'm surfing etc while scanning. I started using PS7 instead of CS as the host application and it seems a lot better in that respect because I guess PS7 isn't verifying every two bits to make sure I'm not scanning money film.

 

But even when there is a pause, it doesn't affect the quality of the scan.

 

My system is P4 2.53GHZ 1GIG RAM; USB2.0

[aa2000]

I forgot to tell you about my system: it's an AMD at 1.7GHz ("Pentium rate 2Ghz") with 512 MB SDRAM. Hmmm... Compared to yours, mine seems antique... :))

 

Indeed, the CPU is at 100% while scanning; still, the system is working fine, I mean can't detect any slowdown, unless I stress it same time with another CPU time consuming process, eg. editing a 150MB file in Photoshop.

 

Thanks for answers.

[og]

Hi Alexandru,<br>

I tested the performance of the '5400' quite a bit. Here are my findings:<br>

- Be happy: your AMD 1700Mhz is exactly what you need to get the max speed for scanning at 2700dpi or 5400dpi with ICE & GD (but not for the 1 minute thing with 5400dpi-16bits without GD&ICE...)<br>

- I would recommend to scan in the stand-alone utility, and not using other big applications at the same time... but it doesn't matter that much - except for performance and stability... ;-)<br>

- With ICE, the CPU utilization is always reported as 100%, even if less CPU is really in use...<br>

- I get about 5mn30s for scanning a Positive at 5400dpi-16bits with GD&ICE with Auto-Exposure=OFF. If you get approximately the same timing, then be happy (again :-). Otherwise, look for something about your USB2.0 settings.<p>

 

Hope this helps,<p>

 

Olivier

[michael_chini]

Happens to me too. I'm sure it's a memory problem since it gets worse when I

surf the web or have lots of images open. But as another said, it doesn't affect

the scan quality which is all that really matters to me.