Getting a 30-Year-Old Mac SCSI 35mm Film Scanner Working in 2026

That title sure has a lot of specific terminology, eh? Let’s break it down: Ronan Gaillard bought a device, made in 1997, that scans 35mm film to digital. It only cost 10€, which is a steal. The problem was that it communicates through SCSI and only talks to drivers made for Mac OS 7 and 8, running as a plugin for Photoshop from the era. Thus, Gaillard set out on a quest to reverse engineer the scanner interface.

Gaillard actually does own a compatible computer: a Macintosh SE/30 running Mac OS 7. But he didn’t want to deal with Photoshop to get the compatible drivers for the Epson FilmScan 200 unit. SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) adapters are a real pain, too. Gaillard wanted something more lightweight and straightforward: a simple driver that would scan and save images—nothing else.

The basics weren’t too hard to figure out. Gaillard did his development in Think C 5.0 on the SE/30, using standard SCSI commands to initialize the scanner, set its parameters (color mode, resolution, and area), start a scan, and save the data.

However, there were some challenges. The FilmScan 200 has a carrier that holds six film frames, but Gaillard couldn’t get it to select specific frames. Luckily, he stumbled across a website still hosting a driver and documentation made for the scanner way back in 2002, which explains the commands to select frames.

There was also an issue with saving color photos, as the RGB (actually GRB) data blocks weren’t intuitive. Gaillard was able to work through that by digging into the old driver from 2002.

That proved to be a success and now Gaillard can scan film to the SE/30, transfer those to a Mac via a Python FTP server running on the latter, then invert using Filmvert. The results are great! And if you want to use the same scanner, you can find the new driver on Gaillard’s GitHub page.