HP C5100A - Cannot Recalibrate

[john_baum1]

<p>I am trying to recalibrate my long unused PhotoSmart C5100A SCSI scanner. I have a 'symptom' but no indication of what it is intended to communicate.</p>

<p>1) To make a fresh start, I unplug the power cord</p>

<p>2) The scanner sets itself to scan slides</p>

<p>3) I press the settings bar and it moves to negatives.</p>

<p>4) When the light is steady and then off, I press again to go to prints.</p>

<p>5) With much grinding, etc it moves through the 'print' setting and resets the opening for slides and all the lights illuminate as though it is 'ready' to scan slides, 35 mm negative, and up to 5x7 prints. It is 'hung' at this point and will do nothing until I 'reboot' it by going to step (1) above.</p>

<p>6) I can get it to scan a slide. I control it using VueScan. Unfortunately, the resulting scan is badly out of focus, so I think the scanner needs to be calibrated.</p>

<p>7) The scanner seems to do a bit better with color negatives.</p>

<p>What am I doing wrong?</p>

<p>Should I throw in the towel and try to find something more contemporary? Should I be considering the Plustek 7600i-Ai? This review seems to give it good marks.</p>

<p>http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/scanners/plustek.shtml</p>

<p>I am working on a GamePC, custom built PC, constructed in Feb 2008. It is based on an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4 GHz) on a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P Intel P35 ATX motherboard and a SAPPHIRE HD 3870 512MB GDDR3 PCI-E video card. I have elected to continue to use my 18" Dell 990 with color management by Pantone & X-Rite - hueyPRO Ambient Calibration Application Version 1.5.0.</p>

<p>It is probably stretching this inquiry a bit far, but I am running XP-Pro/SP3 (fully patched) and use PS Elements 6.0 which Secunia is telling me is 'end of life' software. What experience have others had with 'upgrades' of software? At age 72 I am loath to spend time learning new software just to have access to 'bells and whistles' I will never use.</p>

<p>Thanks,</p>

<p>baumgrenze</p>

[cabbiinc]

<p>Going to Vuescan's site I find this http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/hp_photosmart_c5100.html is this your scanner? If yes you may need to drop Ed a line and inquire. That page states that there is no film scanning capability. If it's not you may drop Ed a line and ask if there's a name mismatch or something similar. If the software thinks there's a different scanner there it would likely cause issues.</p>

<p>If your scanner supports focusing, there should be something on the Input tab (in the more advanced modes) between setting Skew and Number of Passes for setting Auto Focus, set that to Always, or set to Manual and zero it out to see if it's any better (then all the way +, then all the way -, see what looks best). If it doesn't auto focus then you may look at how the slides/negs sit on the glass or look at the height of the media from the scanner head.</p>

<p>If you went with a Plustek 7600 you could just get the least expensive version of the 7600. Vuescan will work with it (assuming you have a recent enough version of Vuescan) and you won't have to learn much. The program does change based on the scanner it's driving, but most things are the same.</p>