Looking for SCSI Linux Scanners

Chacham asks: "There's a lot of scanners out there, and I'd like to buy one. I first checked the Ask Slashdot archives and found this, but at over a year old I thought it might be good for an update. I'm looking for a SCSI, Linux supported, color scanner. Although price will eventually play a role in which I purchase (probably up to US $500), I would like to hear comments with emphasis on quality. Speed is nice, but unless it's super slow, I'll go for quality. Deja lists scanners in a poll but it doesn't look like there are enough submissions for a real comparison. I was looking at SANE supported scanners. Many are listed as alpha or beta, and only a few as stable. I've been hearing good things about HP scanners, but with alpha support under SANE, I'm not so sure it's a good idea. Although, I guess I don't need to use SANE; are there other good packages out there? "

Comments

Re:UMAX

[(startx)]

The UMAX SCSI scanners are pretty well supported, but DO NOT get a parallel or USB UMAX scanner, they are completely unsuported becuase UMAX made the protocols and such completely proprietary.

See the website

[bluGill]

Supported Scanners Some USB scanners are now supprted, but expect USB support to be reworked in a year or two once people figgure out how USB works best. (ie right now USB is in a state of quick hacks and amazement that things work. Things are looking better, as work is going on, but I get the feeling that the programers are not sure how to do USB best/right

There are scsi scanners that are unsupported. There are one or two parrelle scanners that happen to work. There are usb scanners that will never work, and usb scanners where the manufacture hopes they will work soon.

I have a microtek V6USL which works just fine, though only were the very latests backend (which I don't belive is intigrated into any current versuion of SANE yet)

Color management in Linux

[dufke]

One thing I have noticed with the Gimp, is the apparant lack of ICC/ICM color management. I'm afraid this would seriously reduce the usefullness of the software in a proffessional (sp?) setting. To tell you to truth, I have never encountered any kind of color management in Linux (ok, apart from 'gamma' settings).

I wonder how difficult implementing ICM on Linux would be. I have been trying to find out how holds any patents on the subject, but have failed thus far. Anyone know anything about this?

dufke

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UNAX Astra 610S

[planet_hoth]

I picked up a UMAX Astra 610S SCSI scanner last summer, it works just fine with Linux and sane.

Speed is what you'd expect from SCSI (nice and fast, esp. compared to parallel port models.) The scan quality is as good as other (windows-based) scanners I've seen.

Only bad thing I have to say about it is that dark photographs come out slightly murky; if you're scanning in bright stuff there's no problem. I don't know if this is a by-product of the scanner itself, the sane drivers, or my inexperience. ;)

Don't bother with the cheapo SCSI card that comes with it: I couldn't even get it to work from windows 95. I bought an adaptec; Red Hat automagically detected and configured it.

Can't beat it on price; I got it for around $80.

Epson GT-7000

[Tet]

I eventually decided to go with the Epson GT-7000 SCSI. It was far from the cheapest option (£180 -- about US$290), but it was worth every penny. It's probably the single best buy I've made for my computer. Extremely good quality, very fast, and it works like a dream with SANE. Everything I could ask for, basically. Avoid low end scanners. They tend to scan too dark, and correct it later in software, but the results are never as good as those from a better scanner.