Scanner choices

[ammo]

Anyone using an Epson Perfection 3490? According to the SANE hardware list it's status is "good, the device is usable for day-to-day work. Some rather exotic features may be missing". What exotic features are missing?

http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html

I tried finding a Epson 3200 but they're no longer sold anywhere. Finding newer, high resolution scanners with 'complete' status is tough. I lost the eBay auction too. I'll probably get a 3490 and see what it can do unless someone gives me a real horror story.

I'm looking for 3200 dpi for photos and negatives. Ability to scan medium format negatives is preferred.

Thanks.

[fos]

I have a Visioneer OneTouch 8100. I have had very poor luck getting it recognized.

Let me know if you have any luck. I would like to some work with OCR.

fos...

[darkman]

I have a CanoScan LiDE 20. It works great, but it can only go to 1200 dpi.

[benjaminq]

For high resolution scanners I don't know, sorry. For lurkers of the thread. I have a HP PSC 2355 and scanning, printing and cardreading all work fine, there is even a GUI for mainenance programs in the hplip package. The cartridges can be refilled at least once without loosing quality.

What I know from high resolution scanners, but my info may be outdated: I think all the SCSI scanners are supported, so if you can consider buying (or ebaying) a supported SCSI adapter you might have a broad choice of supported scanners. Please correct me if I am wrong.

BEnjamin

[chris_b]

I use an Epson 3170 which I've had for about 18 months. It produces very good scans of paper docs, photos and negatives. (To be honest I haven't tried the latter 2 in Linux yet).

Some of the Epson scanners (like the 3170) aren't supported by vanilla sane, but rather by an Epson sane-type backend called iscan some of which is proprietary. This might be because some firmware is loaded into the scanner as part of initialisation.

I'm currently having some issues as I can't easily use the scanner as non-root. I think this is to do with permissions - the iscan package is accessing the raw usb device. At the moment I'm running the iscan programme using sudo.

According to the epson site

http://www.avasys.jp/english/linux_e/index.html

the 3490 is supported by iscan, so subject to the above you should be ok. I run Kanotix 2005-04

Chris

[chris_b]

I've just tried scanning a strip of old negatives and it all works ok. You do a preview of the strip, then zoom into one picture on the preview and scan at 3200dpi. Also works fine with 80mm square colour positive.

Note that other scanning programs like xsane can't find the scanner, and the gimp plugin also doesn't work - perhaps because it's not "real" sane.

I'm going to carry on pursuing this further ...

Chris

[ammo]

Thanks for the help and reports everyone.

I figured out how to navigate the Epson Avasys web site and found the latest list of supported scanners in iScan. It includes the 3170, 3200, 3490, 3590, etc. on the Download Form. Now I have a few more purchase options. I'll probably pick up a 3490 this weekend at a local store.

Chris, I found this page that might help your non-root and gimp problems.
http://www.sujee.net/geeky/epson-2400.html

Another webpage also mentioned scans coming into gimp as transparent. Setting the layers&channels to 100% Opacity will display the image. Silly error.

John

-- Libranet Alumnus, still working in the spirit of Libranet.

[ammo]

I went and did it. The 3490 would only scan 35mm negatives so I ended up with the 4490. At first, I didn't want to pay $250 for some extra resolution. My plan was to ask for a $50 discount from Best Buy and only buy it if they agreed, (heh, that'll never happen). Well, they had a mail-in rebate for $50. How could I argue with myself? :oops:

I couldn't get the iscan source to configure. I really don't understand how to get around compile errors. I used alien to make debs from the rpm and used dpkg to install. I had to force--overwrite to get past some pre-existing man files.

It scans ok with xsane or iscan. iscan is faster. Xsane has some preset color balances for various negative types that I'll need to play with. The resolution max is 2400dpi using either package though. Mmm. Maybe that will change with a later versions.

All in all, I'm pretty happy. gocr works ok too and much faster than I remember ocr being. A decade of cpu speed and software improvements will do that.

John

[chris_b]

Glad you got scanning, John.

Had a look a the page you suggested, thanks. Problem here is that the device /dev/scanner0 isn't being created by udev. According to strace, iscan tries to use a variety of ways to talk to the scanner including via the non-existent /dev/scanner0 and in my case winds up using the raw device, which seems to be where the permissions problem lies.

The crazy thing is that I had this working as user in an earlier install of kanotix. I reinstalled as I'd be fiddling around and likely broke something else and the scanner no longer worked from a non-root account. I've found another page with some more information on the problem - it's in French so it's going to take me just a leetle bit longer :wink:

Chris

ps what distribution are you using?

[ammo]

ps what distribution are you using?

Hmm, that's a toughie. It used to be LN3. But I've pointed the repositories to Sarge, backports, and marliett now. I've upgraded packages but not if it tries to remove adminmenu. Superstitious I guess. My X server is the biggest thing that's getting out of date. I also don't tend to upgrade kde apps unless I use them, like k3b. I'm a gnome guy.

I could try scanning with my straight Sarge or Parsix distros too. Parsix is Kanotix with gnome and some Persian stuff. I'm not Persian but wanted Kanotix without the trouble of replacing kde with gnome. Not that I'm using Parsix much yet.

My scanner was found using /proc/bus/usb/001/003 when I ran this procedure from the iscan manual. I don't have a /dev/scanner0 either.

1. run sane-find-scanner to find the USB connection
$ sane-find-scanner | grep 0x04b8
found USB scanner (vendor=0x04b8,
product=0x0110) at libusb:001:002
From the sample output above the USB connection is at 001/002.
2. change the permissions with
# chmod 0666 /proc/bus/usb/001/002
Of course, replace the numbers with those you found in step 1.
Note that you will have to do this every time you (re)connect or power
cycle your USB scanner or reboot your computer.
If you want to check whether you are using libusb, just have a look at
the /etc/sane.d/epkowa.conf configuration file. It should have
an
usb
line (without a leading ‘#’). Specifically, the
# usb /dev/usb/scanner0
line (and the lines like it) should all start with a ‘#’.

Good luck with the non-root thing. Let us know what licks it.

John