PowerPhase FX power & software

[monkeyfist]

Hello

I gather that mac laptops do not provide enough power through the firewire connection.

And as i'm cheap, i was wondering what voltage does the back operate on? I can just splice a firewire cable an attach a suitable power brick. Firewire seems to have quite wide voltage range, so the back has a voltage converter and can take wide range of voltage?

The other option being just a powered firewire hub/repeater, but i guess that would do the exact same thing than i can do by splicing the cable and adding a powerbrick.

Also, another cheap question. Does the latest Image Capture 4.0 / 4.1 software still cost 400€? I'm asking this so i know will i be going with an older G4 mac and the 3.6 software. Im under the impression that the 3.6 os 9.2 software does work on OSX 10.5 in classic mode ? Is this correct?

[Ulf]

HI

We would of course not recommend you to splice any cables and instead simply by some kind of repeater instead.
https://www.lindy-international.com/FireWire-800-Repeater-Hub-3-Port.htm?websale8=ld0101.ld020102&pi=32911

The software you can download for free here:
ftp://ftp.phaseone.com/Software/FX/

Here is the brake down of the versions:
3.6: For Mac OS 9
4.0: For Mac OS X on PPC processor
4.1: For Mac OS X on Intel processor.

Image capture 4.x is native in Mac OS but requires Rosetta sub layer.
Last Mac OS to have the Rosetta sub layer was Mac OS 10.6.8

[monkeyfist]

Hello

Thanks for the reply. I ended up getting a compact firewire hub that has an external power source. I kinda just wanted to keep the setup clean, and splicing would have been the cleanest option.. especially if i could have used the same power source as the laptop. But lets take the safe route first and check that everything is running fine.

I picked up a 12" G4, but in the future ill be looking into getting this thing running an powered of some compact laptop & its battery. As the 4.2 supports intel cpus... it should be possible. As ideally this could be a really clean setup.

You could even use some small form factor pc & battery, and just WIFI vnc the screen to a smartphone

Cant wait to get this running. Great time to get into these systems, as they still offer superior quality and with luck can be sourced with a fraction of the original price. Previously owned the 36mp scisi version, and it took me 5 years to get my hands on one of these

[Ulf]

I love to hear you are enjoying this.
On a side note, you mention PC which to the common man mean Windows. There there never was a Windows version of Image Capture which could run the FX backs.
Last version was 3.11 which only the SCSI base back where supported l am sorry to say.

[monkeyfist]

Yes, i'm painfully aware of the no Windows support. Especially on the SCSI models... no 16bit really killed it I had to use and old mac.

Well, i just made my first scan. And I can report that it seems to work just fine without any extra firewire power. I just plugged it in, and it works. Even with just the powerbooks battery.

Im using Powerbook G4 12".

Seems that only if the battery power gets low, it crashes. With power adapter plugged in, no problems.

Maybe its because i'm not using the probe that would draw extra power? Shame if I ordered a punch of fireware cables & the hub if i dont need them. With led lights, the probe is not really necessary. You dont even need to use the IR/UV filters with leds.

So guess i dont even need to look into hackingtoshing some PC with higher wattage firewire output.

If i wont run into any problems, i'll just get a later model macbook pro with a bit more cpu power. Seems the back still needs to stall occasionally to wait for my powerbook. But getting 757mb files out of a old machine like this seems quite insane.

132 megapixels surely starts to looks like LF quality. And seems to be quite close match with the optical resolutions of LF lenses. I calculated something ~60lp/mm resolution for the sensor at 8micron pixels.

What is the native ISO on these things? 400?

Really happy with this, took me 5 years to hunt one down with a reasonable price. And this one i got, was almost a bargain price.

[Ulf]

HI

This brings a old issue which has been around for a long time.
The power required for this, is so close to maximum power output that it may or may not work.
We have had customers who has run this without power conditioner for a long time despite the recommendation and said it was working fine. And then, one day it didn't.
This could be battery degradation, a software installed which draws on the CPU in the background, upgraded operating system or something else.
Desktops (Towers and not iMac's) do have a much more stable power and hence does not have the same issue.
I would not recommend to go down the hackintosh rabbit hole, but rather look for a used Mac Pro 2006 to 2010 which all can run Mac OS 10.6

[monkeyfist]

I definitely do not want a big mac pro in my house I'm rather looking into maybe getting a 2010 11" macbook air or 2010 13.3" macbook pro. As i just want something as compact as possible. Its not like i do anything else on the machine, but to scan the files directly on a usb stick or sd card.

And yes, im happy to avoid the hackintosh rabbit hole.. it would have taken so much time. And macbooks are actually quite nice laptops, nice premium aluminium case.

My first scanback was a dicomed with the huge processing unit & integrated hardrive So i'm more into getting this as compact & user friendly as possible. After that i got the Photophase Plus, and that was already a big step in the right direction. But using this with just one firewire cable and a 12" G4 is luxury! It really does not feel outdated at all for a 20 year old piece of hardware. Fast, responsive and the OSX 10.5.8 looks & feels pretty much the same as a modern OSX.

Luckily 10.5.8, that i'm running on this, was even supported by xrite for my photomunki profiler so i could color calibrate the monitor. So i can get at least semi accurate representation of the colors in the preview.

Big step up from the yellowed old G3 i was using on my photophase plus & the big power brick & clunky SCSI cable.

I think this will run just fine on these laptops using power adapters, these old machines have weak deteriorated batteries. So i did not really expect it to run on the battery power.

And i still got the firewire hub that i can use as a power conditioner if i ever need to. Maybe i will turn it into a battery adapter, if i ever need to battery operate this. I can just power it with a separate battery, this way it wont drain the laptops battery. And it would be perfectly feasible to use this even on the field. Even though using this on the field probably does not make much sense.

Thanks for the help!

[NNN637222151973515737]

Hello everyone,I want to use powerphase FX back on my apple G5 computer with OS X 10.4.11 and I installed classic 9.2.2 environment, but i never get sucess to launch the phase one 3.6 software, the window says "the application phase one 3.6 could not be opened because unknown could not be found". does anyone got idea? much appreciate your help.

[Ulf]

Hi
This wont work under classic environment, it has to work in a native environment and not under emulation.
But since it is a G5 with Mac OS 10.4 you can use version 4.0 instead and it should work fine.
Link to the software you find in the start of this thread.

[NNN637222151973515737]

HI Ulf
really appreciate your answer. I downloaded the 4.0 file, but phase one installer always open failed.is there something wrong in my OS.10.4?

[Ulf]

Hi
There shouldn't be.
Contact us in support and we'll help out.

Http://support.phaseone.com

[NNN637222151973515737]

Hi Ulf, I shouldn't use a pc computer to extract zip files. now it's works perfectly. thanks a lot!!

[Ulf]

Hi

I am glad to hear that,

[Calebarchie]

I am still looking for an FX back, please contact me if you have one to sell