All shot in 1997 January from a IL-76 aircraft.
Aerial shot of the winter snow over the Leh mountains while approaching Khardung-La pass
Shot this in 1997 from an IL-76 aircraft while sitting in the navigators cabin which is located in the nose of the aircraft, right below the cockpit. Transparency film scanned.
A bit of trivia, the IL-76 navigator feeds in the nav data into the nuclear proof huge valve computer in binary !!!
Approaching Khardungla
Atop Khardung La
I scanned these in using my old Nikon LS-4000ED firewire based film scanner. The USB scanner was announced later. Hence need the PCI firewire card as the new PCs dont have Firewire ports anymore.
I plugged in the Ratoc PCI firewire card, a Ratoc PCIFW3. The PCIFW3 is a TI TSB43AA22 chipset card. (I think an NEC one came originally with the scanner) into my win 7 PC. fired it up. The card got recognised easily. I am assuming that NOT all PCI 1394A firewire card would work. The Ratoc PCIFW2 or the PCIFW3 cards should work just fine. Ratoc is the one recommended by Nikon.
Luckily I had already updated my scanner firmware to 1.10 when I had years ago when I had a Win XP system. I then followed this link to get the scanner recognised by Win 7. .Worked like a charm. Check my notes here ( https://www.krishphoto.com/equipment/installing-the-nikon-coolscan-ls-4000-scanner-on-winxp-sp2.html )
In case the firmware on the scanner is not firmware 1.10 , you will need to find a Win XP box , upgrade the scanner firmware and then move to win7. To check firmware version, you will need a Win XP box ….
Update : 17 December 2016
I have been researching firewire cards since my Ratoc card is now bust. Mostly any TI chipset TSB43AA22 IEEE 1394A card ( note 6 pin, 400M/Bits) should work since, the firewire controller inside the LS-4000 scanner is the TSB41AB3
Like SIIG NN-E20012-S2 or Syba seem to have TI chipset cards. Need to try them out.
The second chipset that could work is the NEC G72872GC
The trouble with Firewire is that it was first introduced by Apple and the specs were not strictly followed by all manufacturers. So its important which chipset you finally get this scanner to work with. Then there is the win 10 driver thingy to overcome too.
This should work for the Nikon LS-8000 scanner too.
Update 25 February 2018: I managed to get the original Ratoc Firewire Card from eBay, the Ratoc PCIFW2. Sure enough it has the NEC chip. I sourced the Syba SD PEX-30009 card since its PCI – express . Hard to find the old PCI slots in the new motherboards now.
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