[ale] flatbed scanner

[maddog@li.org]

Hello Todd,

I took an opposite approach and googled for "low cost scanner for Linux" and came up with a recent (2015) review that raved about the Canon LiDE 220 which sells for 90 USD on Amazon (actually 75-80 USD if you poke around enough).

http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/the-best-cheap-scanner/

This scanner supports TWAIN which is what SANE is based on.  There seem to have been some hiccups in the support last July:

In fact there's now a sane-git PPA for getting the latest drivers pre-built: launchpad.net/~rolfbensch/+archive/ubuntu/sane-git (currently not quite solving my Lide220 problem, but better than out-of-the-box on 15.04) – andybuckley Jul 23 '15 at 11:27

but that seems to be fixed too.  If it does not work you may want to make sure that it is not using a USB 3.0 port (some more work needs be done there, but it is reported to work with USB 2.0 or have USB 3.0 functionality turned off in the bios.

By the way, your question brought back a raft of memories.  The original author of SANE was David Mosberger-Tang.  I first knew him as a graduate student during the Alpha Linux port, where we took the Linux kernel and made it 64-bit.  One of the finest gentlemen and programmers I ever met.  David did the work on the libraries, better fitting them to the Alpha.  When the porting work was done he decided that using scanners on Linux was too hard, so he wrote SANE, relying heavily on the TWAIN standard, and later the graphical interface to it, "xsane".  Recognizing his work, I arranged to have an Alpha system loaned to David from Digital (DEC) on long-term loan....a system that (back in those days) would cost about 20,000 dollars US.

In May of 2002 I was contacted through email by David.  He was not using the Alpha system any more and he wanted to return it.  Unfortunately DEC had been purchased by Compaq, I left Compaq in 1999 to do FOSS full time.  It was hard for me to find the person in Compaq to "accept" the system from David.  As I was about to answer David, who had accepted a job at Hewlett Packard, that I did not know who to return the system, a news item came across the Internet that Compaq had been purchased by HP.

I wrote to David: "Just keep the system, in another week it will be 'home'."

And now you know the "rest of the story".

I hope my offering helps you find your scanner.

Warmest regards,

maddog

----- Original Message -----
The sane-project web site has a list of supported scanners. But there 
are hundreds of them listed there. Maybe I could settle on a price 
range, go through the list, google for reviews, and narrow down my 
choices a little.

PS: I have no idea how old my scanner was when it broke down. Somebody 
just gave it to me about 15 years ago because they couldn't find drivers 
for it for XP -- yes, XP. But linux supported it and still does.

-- Todd



On 01/04/2016 01:13 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> Todor,
> I'm 99% certain that all the flatbed scanners at MicroCenter will work
> perfectly with SANE. That should be the backend for all Linux scanner
> software. As much as HP irritates me, I would not hesitate to buy the
> $300 one with the sheet feeder if I were in the market. I have a 10+
> year old Epson that is USB v.1.1 only but it works perfectly still.
> On Mon, 2016-01-04 at 12:58 -0600, Todor Fassl wrote:
>> My flatbed scanner died recently. I'm blind and I need a flatbed
>> scanner
>> to OCR my mail and books and stuff. Anybody have a recommendation for
>> a
>> linux compatible flatbed scanner for use with tesseract?  I don't
>> evn
>> know how much I should expect to pay. I see scanners out there for
>> $200
>> and others for $1200.
>>
>>
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-- 
Todd
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