FOTOTAK Scanner

[Gort]

I recently purchased a FOTOTAK scanner and wanted to know if anyone was familiar with it.

It's brand new - out-of-the-box but it is over 2 year old technology. It has a proprietary parallel card than requires some strange addressing. It seems to conflict with any address I try on a pentium machine, seems to want to write is PCI bus addressing.

I bought it because it has the capability to scan slides and negatives, and it was cheap since I tink they went out of business.

If anyone has any experience with this, please let me know. Jon Holmen

http://www.djcyborg.com

http://www.i-hate-computers.org

 

[edfair]

Could that strange parallel card be a scsi card? Outside connectors can be the same. And that might also account for the strange addressing problems. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[ShaithisDanoveur]

Look by the port on the scanner. Do you see something that looks kinda like a C with a line inside it? (it's also been described as a claw)

OR

Do you see rows of pins all joined together, or possibly even (dare we hope) something marked "TERMINATOR" on the back of the scanner?

If you see this, it's a SCSI, and that scanner will work with any SCSI adapter. Pick up an inexpensive PCI SCSI adapter from Adaptec if this is the case.

 

[Gort]

It's definitely not SCSI. I'm sure one of the reasons this company went under was because they designed their own parallel interface, and the required addressing for it appears to interfere with the PCI buss addressing of newer computers.

The interface card they give with the scanner has a 25 pin male connector on it so a regular parallel cable will not fit in it. A gender bender won't work either because I'm not sure if they use the same pin-out.

It's not serial either, even though they use what used to be a standard serial connector on old PC's.

It looks like a great little scanner, but if anyone finds one at a computer close-out sale like I did, stay clear of it unless you have an older PC that runs Windows and does not have any PCI slots.



Jon Holmen

http://www.djcyborg.com

http://www.i-hate-computers.org