new toys

I’ve been busy acquir­ing, set­ting up, and occa­sion­al­ly curs­ing a batch of new toys.

The dread­ed yel­low line scan­ner has been evict­ed and in it’s place is a new Microtek i900.

So far it and I are get­ting along pret­ty well. Though it’s a right hulk­ing bit of equipment.

Can’t say as much for the soft­ware. I have two scan­ning con­trol pro­grams. The native Microtek soft­ware and Sil­ver­Fast Ai. Every­thing I read about Sil­ver­Fast is true. It’s amaz­ing­ly pow­er­ful and a *total* bitch to fig­ure out.

We bought the Microtek specif­i­cal­ly to scan in DH’s col­lec­tion of 35mm slides. After the first hun­dred or so I think I’ve got the soft­ware fig­ured out and I’m get­ting pret­ty nice results.

The oth­er new toy is a Wacom Intuos3 table. Very sweet. Pain­less set­up, works as adver­tised out of the box.
Most­ly. Once in a while (after an unplanned reboot — thank you very much Micr­soft) Vista gets a lit­tle con­fused and thinks that it’s a tablet PC rather than a graph­ic tablet and the express keys stop work­ing. Hard­ly the fault of the device. Sigh.

edit­ed 25.june.2008 to cor­rect image links