Pocket Ultrascope Not Functional

[David Szelag]

I purchased (2) PUS’s in the hopes of deploying approximately 100 of them in our network. As mentioned over & over, Marketing has failed the industry again releasing a product that’s not ready for prime time. BMD has a # of great products but I feel they don’t provide plug-n-play devices in today’s work flows unless you’re going to stand in front of the unit & press buttons. Remote mgmt seems to be an after thought vs. an immediately available option. For crying out loud… charge for it as many other mfr’s do if that’s the issue. We’ll all buy it because we need it in our work flows. I’ve been burnt too many times in the recent past with the lack of honest marketing of the products abilities. I’m becoming quite the pessimist when considering any more BMD products.

[Nat Jencks]

Hi Josh,

I’m trying to contact you here since you seem to be informed about this issue, and BMD support has literally told me “I’m not sure how much help I can be” when I emailed them.

When I saw that BMD had released a new version of the ultrascope software that said specifically:
“What’s new in UltraScope 1.8
Pocket UltraScope support for Mac Book PRO laptops with Retina display”

subsequent patches specifically noted that the 13″ MacBook Pro with retina display was supported.

Needless to say I was excited about this since like many other users in this thread I had battled with trying to find supported laptop hardware in the past.

So I spent the day going down to B&H, and buying a brand new pocket ultrascope and a brand new 13″ MacBook Pro specifically for use with the pocket ultrascope.

You can imagine my disappointment when I set everything up and found that the ultrascope software simply said “No INPUT” when being fed a video signal. Just to test things I tried using the same pocket ultrascope with the same USB cable and same video feed going to a Mac Pro tower (trashcan) and it works like a charm.

How can this be I thought, it specifically says this machine is supported in the release notes.

So I emailed support hoping to get a quick answer.

You can imagine my continuing disappointment and growing rage when I was told by support that they were not sure why it wasn’t working and “I’m not sure how much help I can be”.

!@#!@!!!

How on earth to you guys expect to gain the confidence of your customers when the products don’t function as advertised and support fails to take these issues seriously? Sorry for the rant, but this has in fact happened to me a number of times with BMD products.

Thanks Josh, and let me be clear this anger is not directed at you, only BMD as a company, and I realize that none of this is your fault, and in fact you are going above and beyond to try and help customers by even taking part in this non-company forum. So thank you.

best-
-Nat

[Danny Hays]

From an earlier Post in 2011, I had to build a desktop with an x 58 chipset motherboard in order for my intensity shuttle usb3 to work on that PC. Since then I have bought two Sony Vaio laptops and a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 and all three work with my intensity shuttle usb3. In fact one Vaio laptop, I put a solid state drive in it and it will capture 10-bit uncompressed Avi where are the original specs said it needed a multi Drive raid system to capture that video.

Danny Hays
Samples of my Work can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ErnestDaniels/videos?view_as=public

[Bob Zelin]

It is April 2016. This is a stupid post.
I have just installed 10 Blackmagic SmartScope Duo scopes at Disney in Orlando today. They cost $995 each, they require NO computer, and they are wonderfully reliable. Are you kidding me – talking about a product from 2011 ? The SmartScope Duo is an incredibly reliable product that does EVERYTHING that you want (yes, 4K too) – waveform, vectorscope, audio meters, picture monitor. It weighs nothing, it requires NO computer (other than to do an initial setup or change what you want to see on the displays).

Just STOP IT with ranting about products from 5 years ago. It’s over.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Nat Jencks]

Ha, thanks as always Bob.

The ultrascope is 10bit vs 8bit, supports error logging and can show the 6-up display rather than the 2-up. But you know all that.

The smartscope duo is ok. But I would prefer to use the ultrascope if it would work on the hardware it now says it is supposed to work with.

[Scott Thomas]

Where I work, a previous engineering regime had bought a Pocket Ultrascope and had it attached to a “portable” computer. I dragged the system out of storage and tried to use it.

The motherboard had USB 3 but there was also a PCIe USB 3 card in the case.

Finally figured out that the Ultrascope wouldn’t work with the motherboard USB and software would run when connected to the PCIe card, but there was no display, just the window frame of the app.

Finally, disabled “Aero” in Windows 7 and the thing now works.

YMMV