[sane-devel] Epson 2480 Transparency Unit - I give up

[Oliver Schwartz]

Hi,

> After several days of working on this problem, it seems obvious
> that the sane package will not support the transparency unit on the
> Epson 2480.  

well, it does, at least for some versions of the 2480. Some people 
have reported problems similar to yours (see, e.g. 
http://alioth.debian.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=301010&group_id=30186&atid=410366 ).
For others, the scanner seems to work perfectly (mostly using 
sane-backends 1.0.15).
I have no clue why this problem occurs for some users and not for 
others. As far as I know there is no correspondence to any version of 
the backend. In fact the code for scanning transparencies has hardly 
been changed in the last three years. I doubt that an earlier version 
of the backend will solve your problem.

> After working for two days with the latest 
> sane-backends package (1.0.16) and having more problems than with
> the older version, I have dropped back down to 1.0.15.  This has
> not solved my problems with the color banding on slide scans, but
> at least it works again for flatbed sources.  

As I explained in another mail the reduced scanning area in 
transparency mode is a security measure for 2580 users. 

> Now I just have to 
> decide whether to buy a machine to use as a dedicated scan server
> (Windows... Yecchhh) or buy a film scanner that is known to work on
> Linux (lots of money).

There is always a third possibility: Fix the problem.


/Oliver