Amateur Photographer & What Digital Camera: KM ScanElite 5400 II and Vista

There have been several posts bemoaning the lack of support for this scanner in Vista using the original software, with the recommendation that Ed Hamrick's VueScan software be used, or the OS be down (up?) graded to XP. Having been forced to go to Vista last year (no XP drivers for the Intel Santa Rosa chipset without streaming your own install set) I have been using VueScan, with reasonable success. However, I missed the KM preview set of all 4/6 frames, and also felt the software was not getting the maximum quality that the scanner is capable of delivering.

The first improvement I made was to uninstall VueScan after unplugging the scanner, and then plugging the scanner back in. When Vista asked to look for drivers, I told it to search the Drivers folder on the original KM CD, and the original drivers were successfully installed. I then re-installed VueScan without the generic driver provided. This gave access to all the hardware capabilities of the scanner, and gave a definite improvement in scan quality. I used this setup for several months, but found I had to spend longer in PhotoShop to get the results I wanted.

Very recently VM Ware released version 6 of their virtual workstation product, with support for USB 2 built in. I downloaded a 30 day trial, installed it, and then installed XP Pro into a virtual machine. This gave me full access to the USB 2 devices on my machine. The original KM software installed flawlessly from the CD, and the KM upgrade also ran just fine. The bottom line - I can now use the original KM setup with no problems. Folders on the host machine can accessed through VM shared folders, so scans can be saved directly to the host.

A couple of gotchas in the process:-

VMWare won't work properly with a USB device that emulates a CD drive (like the Vodafone 3G USB modem) plugged in.

The VM screen driver does not support colour management, so if you profile the monitor, the profile won't load. However, the profile (.ICM file) can be loaded manually in the KM software, and can be verified by turning it on and off for separate preview scans.

At present I am stuck with sRGB, but am working on getting AdobeRGB.

It is an expensive solution, as you have to buy the VMWare Workstation software (US$240) and if you don't have an XP CD hanging around, you will have to buy this as well, although Windows 2000 should work just as well (not tested!).

This will not work with anything less than version 6 (I tried last year with 5.5), and it will not work with Microsoft Virtual PC as there is no USB support.

You will lose the multi-exposure facility of Vuescan (but not multi-scan), and antway there is a comparable facility in KM for highlights and shadows.

You will lose the film selection of VueScan, but for negative film this doesn't matter as KM scans between frames to get a 'background' value, and for slide film, it's not that important.

If anyone is interested in trying this approach and has problems, I will be happy to help out through the forum - virtual machines are not everybody's cup of tea. I would suggest downloading the trial, doing the setup, and then comparing a scan from the original software with one from Vuescan. I was well chuffed, as I had forgotten just how good the original KM software is.

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'You people, you think I know duck nothing; I tell you: I know duck all.'
Credited to Michael Curtiz by David Niven

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