RE: Canon Lide 50 scanner
Try here:
http://www.hamrick.com/
Your scanner is in the list of supported ones with their proprietary program/driver.
There's a free trial available.
Re: Canon Lide 50 scanner
It looks like Vuescan would be an alternative, bit it is way too expensive to validate purchasing for the Canon Lide 50. At $40 for the standard and $80 for the Pro version Vuescan would cost more than the Lide 50 scanner would be worth.
A brand new Lide 90 costs about $70.
I have been a big Canon customer for years and the Lide 50 situation really annoys me. It is just a recomile and there are drivers for the Lide 60 and the Lide 25.
I was really insulted by Canon with their link to their "Customer Loyalty" store, which was supposed to appease Lide 50 customers. A whopping 10% (that is if anything was offered), off of retail. :-). It was
easy to find lower costs outside of their "Customer Loyalty" store.
The Lide 50 works fine for what I need, an excellent, small, light scanner.
Maybe someone could find another solution.
Re: Canon Lide 50 scanner
If you have a DSLR or film scanner, you may find Vuescan useful. I use it with a LIDE 25 (even cheaper than yours!), but I've been a Vuescan owner for maybe 10 years. If you bought back in the day ($40),
Ed gives you support and upgrades for life. Thus far he has done good by me. I got a Minolta Diamage 5400 II about two months before Minolta pulled the plug on the product line. Ed got my scanner working on X64,
preventing a lot of dual booting.
Re: Canon Lide 50 scanner
What you are saying is that Vuescan is more of an "investment". That it might be valuable to me for scanners I get in the future ??
How does Vuescan effect scanning speed. ?? I also would really like it if there was a scanner that used a eSATA port.
Scanners might be different than some other peripherals in that they might be used less frequently and if they do the job, then we're not driven by technology improvements as some other peripherals are.
I am also thinking that I might look at a new scanner and put the $40 into a new scanner instead of the Vuescan software.
I find that Vuescan seems to be a product that is there really for "negative" reasons. What I mean is that it seems that Hardware and Software companies seem to have decreasing the importance, quality and stand of customer service/support in general. With off shoring to contractors for support and service, off shoring of manufacturing, the great reduction of competition in the marketplace due to merges and acquisitions, etc has a lot to do with the drop in commitments to customers.
Re: Canon Lide 50 scanner
Vuescan is really more for photography than cheap flatbed scanners.Since I owned it, I got a vuescan compatible scanner. That save me 64 OS issues.
Vuescan has the ability to profile a DSLR with a test target. Basically, he takes the same IT8 calibration used for film scanners and adopts it for DSLR.
I don't know if it exists because other companies are doing a poor support job. The Minolta software I got was fine except there was no 64 bit driver. I had owned Vuescan before getting that scanner, so it wasn't an extra expense
Re: Canon Lide 50 scanner
I definatelty agree with you about the poor job that many companies are doing with recompiling their drivers/software to provide Vista 64 bit version.
I agree with you about how you describe Vuescan, which seems like a marvelous product. The list of scanners that Vuescan supports is very impressive. My Lide 50 is one of them.
But unfortunately, it is not worth the cost.
How old is the Minolta scanner that you have ??
In the meantime, I have two Canon printers, one of the more than five years old, where the 64 bit drivers were out for it several months ago. No problems.
I have NOT found Canon to be like many of the hardware vendors that think the support ends when the hardware goes out the door. The other Canon scanner, photo and printing Application software all has a
64 bit version. I think a lot of that was done in advance to help out the Linux users who were much faster to adapt to the AMD 64bit chips when they first came out.
If I was offered a decent replacement offer, I would have taken it and would have moved on.
Companies do have different divisions. Just a few weeks ago, my son purchased a Canon all-around Printer/Scanner/Faxer at amazon.com. There was a printing issue with it. that can happen with any companies hardware, it is what is done about that makes the difference. Having a lot of experience with Canon, I told me son to call them, rather then send the printer back to Amazon for a replacement. What Canon did, without hesitation, was do a "free shipping" cross ship of another new printer. They shipping a newone, then when it was received, my son just put the broken one in the box, took the pre-paid UPS label that
was with the printer and pasted it on the box and returned it. What was particularly great was the they sent me son a unit that cost from $40-50 more than than the one he originally purchased.
I remember when there used several high, customer service type of companies that used to do that "Cross-Ship" think. In the last year, I had Fellows do a single ship of a brand new shredder that broke after a year. They shipped a new one and told us to do whatever we wanted to do with our old one. I also have had Bissell do a lot of great stuff like that with Vacuums and heavy Duty Carpet cleaners.
Those things really breed long time customer loyalty.
Re: Canon Lide 50 scanner
The minolta scanner is maybe a year old now. It is a dedicated 35mm film scanner, so it's not the kind of thing that is easily replaceable. BTW, I am using X64, not vista.
If you are not serious about scanning, I wouldn't suggest Vuescan. It is targeted towards high end scanners, though it does support a few cheap flatbed scannners. If you are scanning film in 2008, you are shooting pro slide film processed via dip and dunk. That's about $12 a roll. The cost of Vuescan, even at today's price, is just noise.
