As I state on my blog manifesto, I like to host defunct user manuals out of spite. If you happen to have one of these old USB 2.0 devices (seen pictured above - not shown the power supply and USB cord) and need the software to get it to work, this is the place. I have not checked whether the software is still supported, updated, or online, but assume this will only work with the intended hardware.

I like to get full use out of my hardware by using it well past it's intended time frame, as I confirmed in my recent diatribe about technical debt, and this well-worn but still ultimately useful Prime Film 1800 USB Slide Scanner comes with a English User Manual (987kb PDF File), as well as drivers for very old Mac OS X (I got it to work on 10.6.8) and Windows Vista/98/Me/2000/XP in this 19.9mb DMG Disk Image mastered from a CD (which makes me wonder if the DMG format is supported under any of those same old OS's...)

The scanner captures 1800dpi, which sounds like a lot, but really isn't much when you consider the maximum scan size height is also 1 inch, meaning you will get fairly low resolution images (1701 x 2445 pixels) that can't be enlarged cleanly past 5x7 inches in print (drops below 300dpi). You can click the thumbnail to the right to zoom into a typical raw scan, converted to JPG and compressed using TinyJPG to make it web friendly. The clunky software has many presets to color correct slides and black/white color negatives, as well as custom curves for Ektachrome and Kodachrome positives. I find old negatives and slides are often stored poorly, and require a ton of surface cleaning to get good scans that you aren't spending more time photoshopping hairs off the surface of the scanned image - as you can see in our example scan.