[sane-devel] HP Scanners

[Mark Longridge]

This is when things started to go south:

from HP site:

"Hewlett-Packard Digital Imaging recently decided to eliminate the Software 
Developer Support Program managed by Sykes in Greeley, Colorado, effective 
August 1, 2001. The program managed external requests to Hewlett-Packard for 
both Windows and non-Windows based development (such as UNIX (R), OS2, DOS, 
and Linux).

They had a perfectly logical system which dated back to at least 1986 
called SCL. After 2001 they limited the use of SCL to Multi-Function 
Peripherals. It's not just HP, none of the scanners I've seen for sale
in stores in the last couple of years had any linux support. Even the 
CCD signal processor chip has no data sheet available.. at least in
the case of the HP 5200C. 

It's not the fact that there are no linux drivers that bothers me, it's
the fact that the manufacturer doesn't _currently_ give out programming
documention for their devices. Having said that a couple of folks
from DSPP did help me on some of the older devices.

Going out and buying a scanner without checking the net first is
like getting shot out of a cannon and not checking to see if there's
a safety net. Check first, or spend countless hours trying to reverse
engineer or beg for programming specs. I wrote a letter to Hurd's 
predecessor years ago and nothing happened.

Mark




On August 18, 2006 08:04 am, Dean Loros wrote:
> I have HPlip installed on my system--if only scanners were included in
> the supported devices. From what I see looking here, there seems to be a
> large number of scanners in the current offerings of HP's that only have
> partial function or none at all--hence I decided to tilt my lance at the
> windmill.
>
> Dean Loros
>
> > Only for your information:
> > At least for very most HP printers and all-in-one devices there is
> > really good and active Linux support for printing and scanning, see
> > http://hplip.sourceforge.net/
> >
> > Kind Regards
> > Johannes Meixner