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LaserSoft plumbs the depths

It is strictly verboten to speak!

in General Rants , Thursday, June 04, 2009

This really is the final straw for my relationship as a customer with Germany’s worst software house, LaserSoft

I few days ago, I submitted a topic to the user forum, asking for shared experiences on scanning Portra 160NC with Silverfast. I did not criticise any aspect of Silverfast, or Lasersoft, in fact as far as I remember I was complimentary. I was just a novice negative user looking for advice with the famous NegaFix miracle solution.

So, today, I was a bit surprised to receive this:

Hello drm,

You are receiving this notification because your topic “Scanning Portra
160NC” at “LaserSoft Imaging” was disapproved by a moderator or
administrator.

The following reason was given for the disapproval:

Dear Customer,

our(sic) SilverFast forum is not intended for individual techsupport as this
would make the forum hard to read for users that seek certain help or
information. Also our Support staff can not hadle (sic) “everyday” support over
the forum efficently (sic), therefore please use our support assistent (sic) to get
individual support. If there is no answer in the support assistent (sic) that
solves your problem you will automatically be redirected to our Support
request form where you can create a support ticket.


Yours Truely (sic),
The Site Admin

One can only applaud them from keeping upsetting information like my post from their nervous users.

My answer, also verbatim, after I edited out some possibly inappropriate references to the teutonic character (especially when reflecting on the excellent support I have received from NIK software’s team in Germany):

This is really so bloody stupid. I take the time to participate in your forum, asking a general question to the community about scanning a particular film stock which I’m not familiar with. This is not “tech support” - even if I did also ask tech support - it is actually a topic I have no experience in and am seeking other’s advice. In general this is what a user forum is for (Adobe, Apple, PhaseOne, Microsoft, etc etc)

Your site COULD be the destination for everybody still interested in scanning. It could become a huge resource for the community which in turn benefit you by increasing attention on your products (this is called “marketing”- I suggest you research it)

Fine, I will no longer waste my time on your forum, or your software. Actually, thanks to other resources in the web, I have discovered the wonderful ColorNeg & ColorPos plugins from C F Systems, which demonstrate what a piece of crap “NegaFix"is in particular, and in fact how bad the rest of your terrible, expensive software actually is.

The emperor has no clothes. SilverFast is complete sh*t. There is no magic bullet (VueScan hasn’t got one either). Scan in raw mode and sort it out in Photoshop, or invest in ColorNeg.

Posted in General Rants on Thursday, June 04, 2009 at 01:16 PM • PermalinkComments (2)

2 comments

peter June 27, 2009 - 3:53
I can only agree!
Silverfast does not impress me at all. Negafix sucks.
This must be the worst interface in the world.
Dunno about their customer support, but beeing German myself I am not surprised… This is so stereotypical of us, beeing good engineers and bad supporters…
I have tried ColorNeg and it has an even worse interface, but the inversion is phantastic.
Cheers, Peter

2 comments

david mantripp June 30, 2009 - 5:15
Hi Peter -

Well, ColorNeg doesn't pretend to have a GUI, and is clearly not mainstream commercial software. Lasersoft on the other hand really have no more excuses for their dreadful GUI.

The thing about stereotypes is that they're usually wrong ... I've had wonderful service from German companies, and good experiences with German colleagues.

Thanks for your feedback!
David