Salient Soft

I hit  number of issues getting the scanner to work, even after an extended period where it had worked ok.

There were 3 main issues:-

• During (re)installation of the software, a test scan is done and this typically failed. This was frustrating because when running the SVT diagnostics utility which came with the software, it would readily perform a scan and save a valid JPeg, indicating that there was nothing wrong with the base drivers. The solution to this was to do an advanced install, and just untick the scan test to allow the install to complete.
• I often had issues where the Kodak ScanMate software (which allows scanning to PDF directly using the front panel of the scanner) refused to connect to the scanner. The main issue here was that the correct USB cable (with an inbuilt suppressor component) must be used – any other USB cable seems to be prone to error. In addition, I found that it helped to exit the ScanMate software from the tray, and restart it. This then gives a choice of either starting the scanner first or the software – it was not clear which was best, but at least this allowed a complete reset (especially after changing settings). I also disabled running ScanMate on windows startup. It is straightforward to run from the start menu when needed, which is not very often. I have also tried installing a later version of the drivers etc. (v2.2.6 rather than the v2.1 on the original delivered CD) but this does not appear to have done anything to improve the reliability (at least on Windows 7)
• Having sorted the above and got to the point of performing a scan, I would often get an error whilst the PDF was being created “Failed to format images” after which the scan attempt just died. This link here details how to delete a sys folder to resolve the problem and this certainly helped – the folder however was in fact in C:\Users\SteveW\AppData\Local\Smart Touch\i11xx  in my case under windows 7. I had to exit ScanMate and disconnect the scanner to be able to delete the folder, and it was recreated automatically when I reconnected and restarted ScanMate. An additional issue was that using a high resolution in the settings definitely triggered the issue – to the point that my gut feel is that this may be a prime cause of the problem. It certainly failed  at 1200dpi, and the improvement in quality was hardly noticeable compared to 300dpi. Also a double sided A4 colour scan to PDF increased in size from around 5Mb to 25Mb so it was definitely not worth using. It also took a lot longer doing the conversion/saving at resolutions above 300dpi (and typically e.g. for 1200dpi, took a long time and then failed). In the end I stuck with 300dpi, and just wound the Jpeg quality up to best to help improve things. After this I was able to get reliable operation.

A backup plan if all else fails is to used the SVT diagnostics utility to scan to a JPeg (tweaking the settings allows colour or monochrome selection etc. but paper size appeared to be just automatic). I then used an upgraded version of PDFSam which allowed creation of a PDF directly from the JPeg. To to this I had to register PDFSam but it appears to allow PDF creation as a free option if you register. This worked fine as an emergency backup. The downer with this approach is that each page side gets saved to a separate file, so they all need pulling into the PDF separately with PDFSam – not an issue but a bit time consuming.

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