[sane-devel] film scanner recommendation

[Major A]

Witold,

> I am planning to purchase a modern, quality, but amateur film scanner
> for home use: some negatives but mostly slides, framed and unframed.
> My PC is a Sun/SPARC (SunBlade 100) so I need to rely on sane for
> software.  From the sane documentation I understand there is no chance
> for me to use any USB scanners, so I am planning to go the SCSI route
> (which unfortunately will set me back $300 for a Sun SCSI adapter).

Why not? You will have trouble if you try to use Solaris, but Linux
should handle the USB hardware just fine. In any case, there are very,
very few film scanners with USB out there, the reason being that USB
1.x is really too slow for scanning at decent resolutions.

I don't know how Solaris handles IEEE 1394, but if it uses an approach
like Linux, you can work as if your scanner were a SCSI device.

> Now, the question.  Can anyone recommend a film scanner fully supported
> by sane under Solaris/SPARC, with a good dynamic range for slides?
> The resolution need not be much above 2000 dpi.
> The price however, is of concern, anything above $500 is out of question.

The price will be your big problem: even a bottom-of-the-line scanner
like the Nikon LS-40 ED is more expensive than this.

As far as I am aware, the only film scanners supported by SANE are the
Nikon Coolscans (essentially all of them :-) ), some Microtek models,
and the EPSON FS200. I think that of these, only the Nikons are still
being made (I could be wrong). I've heard of someone trying to get the
Canons working, but I don't know any details.

  Andras

===========================================================================
Major Andras
    e-mail: andras@users.sourceforge.net
    www:    http://andras.webhop.org/
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