I’ve found a ton of my old slides from the 70’s, and want to purchase a slide scanner that would would with either my 2015 iMac and/or 2020 M1 Mac Mini. Peripheral support has been a constant problem for MacOS across every platform and will likely only get worse in Mac ARM world, although hard to see how it could get any worse. You can learn to deal with the orange mask of color negative materials. Done properly the quality will be better than flatbed, can even be faster. But better than flatbed scanning, although even more tedious, is to use your digital SLR and appropriate optical attachments to scanograph your film originals. You can try Vuescan and see if that works for you. The control of transparency scanning in the software built into x86 macos (have not and don't plan to use ARM based MacOS) has minimal controls for and is essentially useless for transparency scanning although ok for basic document scanning. You can research why this is the case, a combination of Apple truculence and what is a tiny market for OEMs vs cost of updating software. I have not used flatbed Epson in a while but when I did Epson support for the flatbed transparency scanner I had stopped with whatever version of MacOS was in use when the scanner was first sold. Canon has not updated Canonscan since, I believe, High Sierra (could be wrong) for MacOS. That software allows full use of the transparency mode of applicable scanners.

Welcome to the world of Apple peripheral support where Apple writes sort of universal drivers and OEMs abandon whatever, if any, operating software they wrote for their peripherals in a prior version of MacOS.Īn example: the Canonscan software for older Canon flat top scanners has worked/been updated for several versions of Windows.

35mm film scanner for mac