[sane-devel] Mustek ScanExpress 12000P backend

[Falk Ahlendorf]

Hi there,

I like to introduce you to a project of mine that I'm following since 2012. 

After numerous failed attempts, I managed to write a working prototype driver 
for the Mustek ScanExpress 12000P Scanner.

What is work so far:
 * Setting up the scanner for gray scan mode
 * Calibrating the scanner (not perfect yet but it works)
 * Setting up a scan resolution of 50,100,200,300 or 600dpi
 * Scanning a gray image

Whats happening next:
 * I'd like to get color scanning working, which should not be to hard, as it
    is basically gray image scanning with three channels
 * The scan process needs some speed improvements it is currently slow as hell
    but I have some ideas to try out
 * The interesting part is getting the internal image processing of the
    scanner up and running, currently the scanning is done in "calibration"
    mode where the image processing is bypassed and I do the necessary things
    in the driver. This workaround has the disadvantage that
    the scanner internal 12bits color resolution are truncate to 8bits
    available to the driver. So the post processing has to be done in 8
    instead of 12bits, which is visible in the resulting output image.
    The current state on this is: if I enable the image processing I get an
    image which has to do something with the input but the colors are more or
    less random.

For those interested in the current working state, you find the source code 
here:
https://github.com/DGhost001/sane-se12000p-backend

The code compiles into my little playground program and a libsane-se12000p.so
that can be used with the dll backend.

Kind Regards
 Falk