Howtek D4000 Drum Scanner Update #2

Did some more cleaning these past few weeks since the last post and solved one problem, but ran into another. 

-Cleaned and cleaned again the pulleys for the drive belt. 
-Cleaned and lubed the lead screw again.-Cleaned and lubed the tailstock bearing.-Cleaned the same drum I had been using.-Re-did the DIY pads I had been using, slightly thinner so they were all within the small recess as the factory pads are. Before, some were slightly too wide which led to the drum not centering correctly on the tailstock.-Cleaned the dust out from behind the FOPI, on that lens. -Cleaned the lens on the other side of the FOPI, illuminator lens?

Now does 2K dpi scans with no hint of lines so that's a big relief. 
Next thing to suss out is now when I set 4K DPI in Silverfast, it always returns an F702 error when checking lumens. At 1K, 2K there is never a problem but at 4K each and every time it pulls the error code.
Sample shot attached:
Wartime black paint Anniversary Speed GraphicBlack paint Kodak Ektar 127/4.7HP5 in HC110 1:100 semi-standBlue painter's tape, dry mountedScanned at 2K DPI

Here is the result:

Howtek D4000 Drum Scanner Update #1

Had some developments in the ongoing saga of the Howtek D4000 drum scanner. Turns out that my Mac G4 tower is just about perfect for this setup. Still has OS 9.2.2 installed on it, looks like it was never used so is very clean and orderly. The OS X has been updated to 10.4.11 (Tiger) but I believe I could update it to 10.5.8 with no issues. I may do that down the road.

Short recap of my setup:

MDD (Mirrored Drive Doors) Mac G4 tower with OS 10.4.11 and OS 9.2.2
Howtek D4000 drum scanner, was at R531 and now at R535 firmware
Trident 3.5.5 and 4, both downloaded from Aztek's site
Aurora 3.0

I had been trying to run some of the freeware/demo versions of software attainable at the Aztek website's Howtek support section but was unable to get any of their programs to talk to the scanner.

Getting it booted directly into OS 9 gave the drivers a direct shot rather than trying to work through OS X's Classic emulation and so it could talk to the scanner. I updated the firmware through MacUtil 3.7 to the R535 version (last released). As I'm writing this, Aurora 4.0 is doing a pre-scan and I will see if it gives the heavy errors (what look like skipped lines, blurring along high contrast edges and generally less than the quality I have seen in other scans).

Howtek D4000 Drum Scanner Intro Post

I have a friend, let's call him JF. JF works at a southern California camera store and so sees lots of interesting and unique pieces of gear come through as the owners want to trade up or clean house.

One of the more unique and interesting pieces he saw was a drum scanner, made sometime in the 1990s by Howtek. This company is still around and still actively services these relics, and they still are top of the class for image quality when it comes to digitizing negatives and slides. JF had someone give the store/him one of these models plus a whole bunch of accessories but it wasn't the right timing for him to be able to put it to use so he passed it on to me and I dragged it recently to New Mexico along with a Mac G4 tower to drive it.

Quick breakdown of specs:
-Scan area of roughly 10x11"
-4000 true DPI scanning resolution. Lots of consumer scanners (anything flatbed) will claim that high or higher but drum scanner pixels are worth 2-5 flat bed scanner pixels.
-Basically the top of the line for digitizing anything not already made of pixels.