[sane-devel] totally blurred

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Thu, Sep 13, 2001 at 12:06:05PM +0200, Christoph Kukulies wrote:
> I'm running RH 6.1 and installed sane 1.0.5.
> My first attempt to scan an image was to use
> 
> scanimage >data
> 
> and I obtained a 500K PGM file, which showed totally blurred.

Blurred? Maybe just in low resolution (72 dpi is standard)?

> # scanimage -L
> device `mustek:/dev/scanner' is a Mustek MFS-12000SP flatbed scanner
> 
> Why does this say MUSTEK 12000SP? It is a 1200SP.

Not really. It may have printed "1200SP" on its front but it's really
a 12000SP. See the SCSI inquiry (e.g. cat /proc/scsi/scsi) and the
label on the scanner's back. It doesn't matter, there is no difference.

> Reading a bit in man scanimage I found options and tried

scanimage -d mustek:/dev/scanner --help

will print all available options for this scanner.

> scanimage -d mustek:/dev/scanner --resolution 1200dpi
> 
> Trying this resulted in starting the scanner and producing a file that still
> wasn't finished after writing 14 MB of data. I stopped the scan.

Scanning in gray at 1200dpi full size will result in about 160 MB of
data. But you can decrease height and width for lower sizes and faster
scanning.

> Scanning at 300dpi is now (after 5 minutes) at 5 MB. I cannot see
> how the scanner is acting because I'm doing the tests remotely, but
> I suspect that the scanner sensor is moving terribly slow.

You can set the variable SANE_DEBUG_MUSTEK to see a bit more what the
backend is doing (e.g. 4 is a reasonable value).

I just tried 
scanimage -d mustek:/dev/scanner --resolution 300 >/tmp/out.pnm 
and it took 45 seconds (229 KB/s). I think that's a normal time.
However, this is with an Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller, if you use the
original Mustek card, it may be much slower. You may try to experiment
with buffer sizes in mustek.conf, see the manual page sane-mustek and
my website (http://www.meier-geinitz.de/sane/) for more information.

It may be easier to use xsane or xscanimage if the X-libraries are
installed on your remote system.

If the images are really blurred, please send me a small example by
email (to me, not the list). Also please send me the output of
"SANE_DEBUG_MUSTEK=5 scanimage -L" and your configuration (operating
system, SCSI controller).

Bye,
  Henning