Film adaptor on a Canoscan flatbed scanner?

So, I’m in the computer lab at my uni, and of the two dedicated film scanners they have here, one is broken and the other just isn’t there. No idea where it is, but it’s not there. :mad:

Anyhow, one of the admin types here suggested that I use a film adaptor for one of the Canon flatbed scanners. I mentioned this to the useless overpaid help desk guy, and he rummage thruogh a pile of stuff on a shelf behind him before producing a little black gizmo with a cord coming out of it and “Canon” printed in big letters on the back. “I think this is what you need. I don’t know how to use it.” I find a scanner, find the appropriate plug on the back of it to plug the gizmo into, and try to use it with Photoshop.

The scanning software says “Calibration can not be performed. Remove film and place film unit at frame 1”. I ask another of the help desk people, and he says he didn’t even know the computer lab had film adaptors for the scanners :smack:

So help me out here, any idea what’s going wrong?

A lot of relatively high end scanners come with film adaptors. On ours it was just a piece of plastic you fit over the scanner to hold the film in place. Nothing more fancy than that… Definitely check with the manual for your scanner. Most of them can be found in full online.