[sane-devel] Trouble with Primax 4800 Direct

Daniel Klär dklaer at gmx.de
Sun Oct 23 15:50:40 UTC 2005


Hello,

> as the pround owner of this masterpiece of scanning technology
> ;-) I'd like to report some problems I have with it and the sane
> backend plustek_pp. The problems are hard to desribe since the
> effect is different every time I try. As a start the color mode
> scans are never correct. Red, green and blue seem to be shifted
> against each other. The shift is the larger the higher the
> resolution is. Sometimes I can scan in Color with 150 dpi, but
> normally either the driver tries to drive the lamp outside the
> scanner or xsane crashes (e.g.after preview scan) or the scanner
> simply doesn't scan. After I switched the PC and Scanner off
> completely (unplug power supply) with some luck I can do some
> simple scans.

That's what I started to write last weekend, when I was frustrated
by unreproducable errors. I was using xsane as root and the sane
version is 1.0.15 (as shipped with Debian Sarge). Today morning I
had some time to investigate the problem a bit more detailed using
scanimage as root.
After some hours of testing, reading debug output and rebooting I
found the mistake, that caused a lot of problems. In
/etc/sane.d/plustek_pp.conf I got the following lines (some lines
removed):
> [direct]
> device 0x378
> option mov 2 
> [direct]
> device parport0
After changing into
> [direct]
> device parport0
> option mov 2
a lot of things started to function, at least for the root account.

# scanimage -L
|device `plustek_pp:parport0' is a Plustek Primax 4800 Direct
|parallel port flatbed scanner
|device `net:localhost:plustek_pp:parport0' is a Plustek Primax 4800
|Direct parallel port flatbed scanner
Looks good and saned is running too.

# scanimage --help -d plustek_pp:parport0
The output contains the following lines:
|  --mode Lineart|Halftone|Gray|Color [Color]
|  --resolution 50..300dpi [50]
|  --x 0..215mm [126]
|  --y 0..297mm [76.21]
If not specified otherwise the scanner scans with the settings in
brackets. I can scan with other settings, but I have to specify
always all the four parameters. Xscanimage also shows these
preferences and crashes immediately (simply disappears from screen)
when I try to change it.
I thought the values in brackets are updated, when a scan with other
settings is performed? How can I set the defaults?

A scan like that
# scanimage -v -d plustek_pp:parport0 -x 210mm -y 148mm --mode Color
# --resolution 150dpi > test.pnm
usually works with several values for -x,-y and -mode , but with
--resolution 300dpi the lamp tries to leave to scanner with some
ugly noise. Well, that's a constrain I can accept.

If I use the device "net:localhost:plustek_pp:parport0" instead the
colormode doesn't work properly. It scans and I can recognize the
image, but the colors are totally wrong. The proportions of the
image are o.k.
It becomes worse when I try the same with a non-root account. The
color problem is the same, but additionally the image is jolted. If
I use Gray instead of Color (as normal user) it becomes crazy: The
left half and the right half of the image are obviously exchanged.

Any idea what I might have configured wrong? If scanimage produces
different output via saned, it isn't an issue of the backend???

Finally there's still the problem that after one or two hours system
uptime the scanner stops working at all. Scanimage -V or -L still
works, everything else fails. After shutdown, power off and boot
(reboot alone doesn't help) it works again.

Since the scanner is very old and the changelog of the later version
of plustek_pp doesn't contain any notice concerning "Primax", I
think/believe the error is not caused by the outdated version I
use. Using the current Knoppix-DVD 4.02 scanimage -L puts out a
blinking cursor, that's all. I can (as far this is possible) exclude
a hardware defect, because running the same PC with Win2k the
scanner runs smoothly over several hours in all supported modes and
resolutions.


Best regards
Daniel




More information about the sane-devel mailing list