[sane-devel] Epson Artisan 710 support

[Alesh Slovak]

On 05/14/2010 02:33 PM, Grant wrote:
> I tried a few different frontends including Image Scan and they all
> produced the same horizontal lines.  Increasing the scan resolution
> from 300dpi to 600dpi prevents the lines from appearing, but Image
> Scan is the only frontend I've found that makes 600dpi available.
> xsane and xscanimage both make 600dpi available on the Y axis, but the
> available X axis resolutions jump from 300dpi to 1200dpi.
The x and y resolution lists for this scanner should be the same. This sounds 
like this bug: 
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/2008-July/022433.html

I believe this bug was fixed quite a while ago. What version of SANE are you 
using? You may want to update to the latest version. This may require some 
compilation work on your part, though.

> The problem with Image Scan is it doesn't seem to have proper correlation
> between the preview UI selector borders and the resulting scanned image.
Because the preview is a highly scaled down version of the final output, there 
is bound to be some error when selecting the area. Could that account for the 
discrepancy you are seeing or is it really that big?

With regards to the horizontal lines, could you send me a sample scan off-list? 
Preferably a fairly small area exhibiting the problem scanned at a high 
resolution in a lossless format, like PNG. I don't want to go hunting for the 
problem if it is difficult to spot. Also, to avoid any image processing, please 
make sure to use scanimage to do the scan.

> It also doesn't seem to allow the disabling of image processing.
>
> Is there any way to try the epson2 backend's Artisan 700 support with
> my Artisan 710?  epson2 doesn't support the 710 yet.  Maybe there's a
> way to alter the scanner's USB device ID as it's presented to SANE?

I am not sure what is necessary to get epson2 to recognize the Artisan 710. But 
likely all you need to do is add the USB id to /etc/sane.d/epson2.conf as 
indicated in that file.

This is something I mailed the list about before, but the "Unsupported" status 
of the Artisan 710 and other scanners like it in epson2 is unwarranted. These 
devices are labeled as unsupported because epkowa.desc mentions a proprietary 
plugin for those models. This plugin, however, is only necessary for network 
support when using the epkowa backend and not at all necessary for the epson2 
backend, even when using the scanner via the network interface.

As I mentioned before, when identifying interpreter based models in epkowa.desc 
the correct search term is: "requires DFSG non-free" or just "requires DFSG". I 
suspect that currently "DFSG" or "non-free" is being used which ends up 
including the models that mention the proprietary network plugin.


Happy scanning,
-- 
Alesh Slovak                    Linux Team -- AVASYS Corporation
alesh.slovak at avasys.jp          http://avasys.jp