Introduction

The motivation for modifying and publishing the firmware images below was to fix an error in the manufacturer supplied firmware. Namely that scanners running it don’t produce HD video as advertised. The firmware images below have Auto Exposure and Auto White Balance disabled. The exposure time is fixed at 54ms and the sensor gain is fixed at unity gain. The gain settings for Red, Green and Blue, hitherto set by the Auto White Balance code, are also fixed. These may need to be adjusted for Wolverine and Wolverine Pro machines (which I don’t have). If you find that the color balance is not right with either of these, you can help by scanning some Black & White film and emailing me a short clip. A side effect of disabling Auto Exposure is that scanners don’t stop automatically at the end of a reel and need to be stopped manually using the keypad. I don’t know when or if I’ll get a chance to investigate and fix this. A second side effect is that scanners are now able to set an appropriate bitrate by themselves, meaning my hack from 2024 is no longer needed.

Firmware installation

Below are the firmware images that I have prepared for the various models of scanner.

Using these will most likely void your warranty. They can also potentially render your scanner inoperable. Proceed at your own risk!

Wolverine firmware
Wolverine Pro firmware
Reflecta / Somikon firmware

Once you have downloaded the .zip file corresponding to your scanner, extract the .bin file from it and copy this to an SD card. The formatting of and copying to the SD card apparently needs to be done on a Windows machine. Insert the SD card into the scanner and power it on. The red LED light below the power button will flash on and off. Wait for about 25 seconds, the GUI should appear. Remove the firmware image from the SD card either by using the Format option from the menu or by powering the scanner off, removing the SD card and transferring it to your computer to remove the file manually.

You should now be able to create high quality videos with your scanner.

Thanks

Thanks to Tobias for making available his Novatek firmware tools.
Thanks to Mac84 at tinkerdifferent.com for making available the firmware images that I used to create my modified firmware images.

Get in touch

My contact email is joe@hansom.dev.