Printer & Scanner Drivers

Anonymous (not verified) - Sat, 2006-03-11 18:44

Printer, Scanner and All-in-one Advice

Please add your hints and tips for getting your devices working here.

Sane Support

I've just done a cross-comparison of the flatbed scanners listed on Dabs.com under £300 against the Sane website and list the results below:

Not listed

  • HP ScanJet g2410
  • Epson Perfection V30
  • Epson Perfection V300
  • Canon Lide 700f
  • Epson V350 Photo
  • Canon CANOSCAN LIDE 5600F
  • Epson GT-1500 A4 Scanner
  • HP Scanjet 5590P
  • Canon Canoscan 8800F
  • Epson Perfection V500 Photo

Unsupported

  • Canon Lide 100
  • Canon Lide 200
  • HP Scanjet G4010 Photo Scanner
  • Plustek OpticBook 3600 Flatbed Scanner
  • HP ScanJet G4050

Basic support

  • HP ScanJet g2410
  • HP Scanjet G3110
  • Fujitsu FI-60F A6 Flatbed Scanner
  • HP Scanjet 5590

Complete support

  • None.

Sane Unsupported Scanners on Linux

Given the poor SANE support for scanners, we are forced to look elsewhere for the unsupported scanners:

HP

HP have a good reputation for Linux support, so I have hopes for these. Visited hplib website, which explicitly says that the hp scanjet scanners are not supported on linux.

HP ScanJet g2410

The only solution appears to be a driver available from India at http://www.elcot.in/HP%20Scanjet%202400.zip.  People who have used this driver seem happy, but not exactly a recommended solution.

HP Scanjet 5590P

My first thought is that this may be covered by 5590 driver, and I have found people ordering it for Linux, and no posts saying that they can't get it to work, so my hopes are high. In fact very few posts for Linux and the 5590 either, so these are possibly a good bet with the sane-hp5590 driver. Might be safer to order the actual scanjet 5590.

Canon

Canon do not list any drivers for their low-end scanners, and generally seem to have pretty poor support for linux across the board.

LIDE 700f

Driver not available via Canon website. Plenty of people complaining it does not work under linux and no solutions found.

LIDE 5600F

Driver not available via Canon website. Not many postings on this scanner, but those that there are suggest steering clear of Canonscan LIDE models (although older Lide 30/50/60 I believe do work via the plustek driver).

Canoscan 8800F

Driver not available via Canon website. Came across a posting from 3-days ago from someone on a debian mailing list stating that they had written a modification to the pixma_mp150.c driver to fully support this scanner. He goes onto say that this is the only flatbed scanner to support the PIXMA protocol.

Sounds promising, but as at today, no actual way of getting this scanner working

Epson

Epson explicitly announce that they do not in any way support linux; however this is not the whole story.  I've always found Epson scanners are really well supported. They bend over backwards to provide technical specs to the OS developer community. Epson Avasys (formerly Epson Kowa) even produce proper Linux drivers for Epson printers, scanners and all-in-ones. See

for downloads and their advice forum. For new scanners I would recommend you go to that site and check driver availability before purchase. Their software even seems to support scanning from a networked scanner on Linux or Windows or offering a local scaner as a network resource. 

Amongst the Sane unsupported scanners listed on Dabs.com, the following are all supported by Avasys:

  • Epson Perfection V30
  • Epson Perfection V300
  • Epson V350 Photo
  • Epson GT-1500 A4 Scanner
  • Epson Perfection V500 Photo
  • and more (these are just the sub-£300 scanners on Dabs at the time of writing)

These include 32bit and 64bit debs and rpms and tar.gz files.


References

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