[sane-devel] I have the Epson Perfection 2480 and 2580 for testing

[Till Kamppeter]

Oliver Schwartz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
>>Why does the frontend want to set the gray gamma table to (nil)?
>>
>>[snapscan] sane_snapscan_control_option (0x823a6b0, 24, 1, (nil),
>>0xbfffdffc)
>>
>>Maybe I don't understand something here but that looks strange.
> 
> 
> This seems to cause the crash (which is not that surprising). For some 
> reason the frontend passes an invalid pointer.
> 

I have tried now with xscanimage and have interesting results:

The 2480 and 2580 consist of a lower part with the glass and scanning 
head and a lid with the transparency unit. The lower parts of both are 
absolutely identical, including the USB vendor/product IDs. The 
difference between the 2480 and 2580 is made up by the lids. The lid of 
the 2480 has a simple light which is turned on in transparency mode. You 
insert the film or slides in a special frame and put this on the glass, 
so film or slide are placed under the light and parallel to the 
scanner's borders. The 2580 has an automatic film feeder. You remove the 
white background from the inner side of the lid, close the lid and open 
a little door on the upper side of the lid. There you insert a piece of 
35-mm film and the scanner pulls it in automatically. For slides there 
is a frame for the scanner glass again, but a different one.

In principle the scanners work with SANE and the "snapscan" driver, but 
there are some problems:

- You need the scanner's firmware, as for all scanners used with the 
"snapscan" driver.

- There are long delays between starting the scanner software and the 
GUI opening or the scan beginning. Messages like

[snapscan] Scanner warming up - waiting 33 seconds

appear on the console from where the scanning frontend was started.

- The biggest problem is that the USB device address (like 
libusb:001:015) changes when the firmware is uploaded, it seems that 
after the upload the scanner is disconnected and then reconnected and so 
it gets a new ID.

This means that the very first start of a frontend (after 
connecting/turning on the scanner) lets the GUI open, but trying to 
preview of to scan gives "Invalid argument". Comparing the output of 
"lsusb" reveals that the USB device address changed at the moment where 
the firmware upload finished. On subsequent runs of scanning frontends 
the firmware is not uploaded again and so the address does not change. 
So one can scan when one closes the frontend and opens it again. Perhaps 
one should do modifications on the "snapscan" backend to take the 
reconnection/address change into account.

- The lid of the 2580 is not compatible with SANE. If the lid is in use 
with any of the two lower parts (2480 and 2580) the preview does not 
work. The head moves shortly and the preview is a stripy dirty white. 
Normal scanning does work at least in flatbed mode. Switching to the 
transparency unit makes the frontend freezing.

Both lower parts work without problems when the lid of the 2480 or no 
lid at all is connected. With the lid of the 2480 one can switch to the 
transparency unit and scan transparent documets correctly. Without lid 
the button for the transparency unit simply does not appear.

    Till


> Can you try another frontend (e.g. xscanimage)? It may also help to 
> delete any xsane preferences (stored in ~/.sane/xsane IIRC).
> 
> /Oliver
>