My father recently purchased a Vupoint Solutions FS-V1-VP slide and film scanner. He dutifully read the instructions, installed the latest driver and plugged it into a USB 1.1 port. The computer never detected the device. He exchanged the scanner and had the same result.
An email to Vupoint’s tech support revealed the solution: a USB 2.0 port was required. Even though a USB 2.0 device should be compatible with a slower USB 1.1 port, the scanner was not! We installed a USB 2.0 PCI card plugged in the scanner and the computer detected it right away.
The lesson learned from this adventure: never assume a USB 2.0 device is compatible with USB 1.1.
Update December 27, 2007: Further testing has revealed that the computer will not detect the scanner when it is plugged into a USB hub. The scanner must be plugged directly into a USB 2.0 port on the computer.
This is unbelievably lame, especially considering they advertise this in the Skymall catalog and through direct mail, without mentioning that it is seriously hobbled. We have three computers in our house, two that are new enough to have come with Windows XP installed on them, yet this scanner won’t work with any of them. How hard would it be to make this backward compliant, just like any other consumer electronics device plugging into a USB port?
Be warned that there is nothing in the manual about this either. There is no “troubleshooting” section at all in fact, which says a lot about what this company thinks of its customers.