filmscanners: A funny Scanwit story

["Alan Tyson" <AlanTyson@bknowl.freeserve.co.uk>]

I made a stupid mistake today that made me think the
focusing mechanism on my 1-year-old Scanwit had failed.

When trying to scan frame 3 of a strip of negatives, Vuescan
just kept on saying it was busy, indefinitely, and there was
no sign of the expected focusing step. Miraphoto (the
Acer-supplied software which I haven't used for about 9
months)gave an immediate fatal crash and spontaneous reboot.

I'd just been scanning successfully in Vuescan 6.6.4, and
thought I'd just experienced a hardware failure, as numerous
reboots and restarts and a reinstallation of Miraphoto
failed to effect an improvement.

THEN I realised that I was scanning the first few frames of
a film, and I'd failed to notice a bit of black leader
protruding into the 30x8mm vertical slot at the outer end of
the film holder. This stopped the machine dead because it
couldn't see through the hole.

I tell this tale in the hope no-one else will be so dumb.
Always trim your neg strips neatly.

Have fun

Alan T