Minolta Dimage Multi Pro Mac drivers

[joao_figueiredo]

<p>Hello everyone.<br>

i have a Minolta Dimage Multi Pro Scanner. i've always been a windows user and had no problems until now that i've bought a Mac machine.<br>

I've bought a Imac and now i can't seem to find the Mac drivers anywhere.<br>

Can someone help me? someone send the driver to me, this way i can avoid buying the silverfast software.<br>

Joaoff.figueiredo@gmail.com</p>

<p>thank you</p>

[john_shriver]

<p>The vendors are not porting the drivers for discontinued film scanners from PowerPC Mac to Intel Mac, so they are all (Nikon, Canon, Minolta) software orphans. Plus, the vendors keep the interface to the scanners "secret". (That really shouldn't be legal, but it is.)<br /> There's four options:</p>

<ol>

<li>Buy Parallels "virtual machine" software, install the last version of Windows that there is a driver for, and run the old scanner software in the virtual Windows machine.</li>

<li>SilverFast. It's well-written, you either like it or not. NegaFix is a "mixed bag", the profiles are hit or miss. The support for Q-60 target calibration is great, especially helpful for Kodachrome.</li>

<li>VueScan. It's less ambitious than SilverFast, has a simpler user interface, and is generally functional. (I've had trouble with color management of the preview window on MacOS.)</li>

<li>SANE is an open-source scanner project. It's targeted at Linux, but there is a MacOS port. They do have a driver for Minolta scanners. But since they are generally reverse-engineering, there may be limitations compared to commercial software.</li>

</ol>

<p>I use Parallels with Windows XP to be able to run Nikon Scan. (I also run Quicken there, because there's no good Quicken product for Mac OS.) But I also have SilverFast AI for both my Coolscan V and my Epson V750 PRO.<br>

Oh, I think Parallels is so useful, and reasonably priced, that it really should be your first alternative. Only hassle may be finding a legal non-vendor-locked copy of Windows that you can activate, if you need an older one.</p>

[johncox]

<p>You could also use bootcamp to create a windows partition, but that would really be abandoning the advantages of mac computing. </p>

[john_shriver]

<p>Note that Parallels is <em>not</em> a solution yet for Firewire scanners -- as they have not virtualized that Windows class driver/device yet. (The one exception is Firewire storage devices: disks.) So you can't access a Firewire scanner from Parallels. (So forget, for instance, the Coolscan 9000.) But it works just fine for a USB scanner.<br>

Eventually, all film scanners will require a dedicated workstation running on obsolete hardware and software, that you cannot allow any Internet connectivity to/from.</p>

[andylynn]

Make your life easier and get a Vuescan Pro license. It's one piece of software that makes pretty much all the scanners

work. No extra drivers to download.

[alekos_elefteriadis]

<p>The way to go is Vuescan as Andy say.</p>

[paul_spencer2]

<p>I feel your pain. That's why I've kept my old g4 to run os9 to scan negs. If you need help in this department, let me know.</p>

[chansonbleu]

<p>To process my b&w negatives to a digital format (keeping things forum pertinent) I keep an old machine running windows 98. Then transfer images to newer computer.</p>

[rwbowman]

<p>I own a Minolta Dimage Multi Pro scanner running on a Mac, and in the Mac world the drivers will only operate on a PowerPC Mac, and with OS X no later than 10.5.8. If you still have your windows machine you could scan with it and edit the files with your iMac.</p>

[sora_devore1]

<p>I have a Dimage Multi Pro and I'm running Mac 10.9.5. Is there any way for me to continue using this scanner? I don't really understand how getting vuescan will help me if the computer won't recognize the scanner.</p>