Imacon started releasing a wonderful line of film scanners starting in the 90's under the brand FlexTight. These scanners were unique in that they combined elements from both a drum scanner and a traditional flatbed scanner. FlexTight scanners were known for professional level scanning capabilities at a fraction of the price of a traditional drum scanner. Don't get me wrong, they weren't exactly cheap with the Precision II model listed at a whopping $15,000 in 1999, but the capabilities of these scanners still makes them highly sought after. Unfortunately, over time some of these scanners have relied on outdated companion software and drivers made in an era where SCSI had to be terminated and 32-bit was king.
As it so happens, I have access to a FlexTight Precision II and I was able to get it scanning on the latest version of Windows 11 (22H2) with 64-bit drivers. I can only cover what the installation would look like for a Precision I/II/III as these were very similar scanners, but these might be the only "outdated" models that would require this guide anyway. Let's jump right in!
The first challenge I ran into was drivers for my SCSI controller, an Adaptec 2940-based PCI card. This was pretty easy to fix as the solution was already put together by David and Steve over at savagetaylor.com. If you have an Adaptec PCI SCSI adapter, they most likely have the drivers listed on their post.
I needed the Unsigned driver for Adaptec AHA-29xx cards download. Since these are unsigned you will need to reboot your Windows PC into a mode that allows you to install them by ignoring driver signature checks. I'll cover how to do this in the next section.
My next challenge was trying to get proper 64-bit drivers. I had noticed that newer FlexTight models were supported by FlexColor 4.8.9.1, but after installing the application I got nothing but a fully blank scan. I wasn't sure if my scanner just wasn't supported in this version, or if the drivers didn't support my scanner.
The answer was a little of column A and a little of column B. FlexColor 4.8.9.1 includes 64-bit drivers, but the FlexColor software only listed newer models under the devices menu. Additionally, I noticed after I installed the drivers for my scanner each "SCSI Loader" device in Device Manager had a strange name.
I ended up opening the .INF files for the driver in a text editor and noticed many of the entries were commented out. Sure enough most of these were targeting older SCSI-models like the Precision I/II/III. I'm still not sure if this was 100% needed to get the scanner working, but after installing the drivers properly the naming in Device Manager was fixed.
Once I installed the drivers the scanner was detected by FlexColor 4.8.9.1, but the resulting scan was corrupted. However, once I fired up FlexColor 4.0.3 scanning worked perfectly. Problem solved!
A couple of weeks ago I made a point of archiving any version of FlexColor I could get my hands on. I made another post on this site with download links if you need it. For my Precision II only FlexColor 4.0.3 worked and still works on 64-bit Windows.
Here's the full tutorial for installing the drivers:
Once all the drivers are installed you can try out scanning with FlexColor. Once you've confirmed it works, reboot your machine and you'll be back to a secure driver-signature-enforced Windows.
Previously I had a dedicated machine set up with a Pentium II 400MHz CPU and ran Windows XP for the express purpose of scanning film. It was a chore to get any work done on it, but luckily with these 64-bit drivers these scanners have a new life to them. I have been scanning 120 film at 3000 DPI with RGB-16 for archival purposes and I'm still blown away with the quality I get. FlexColor still leaves a lot to be desired, but it gets the job done. I do most of my editing in Lightroom or Photoshop anyway. Hopefully this guide helps someone out there!