[sane-devel] yet another 5400c sucker

[Joacim Persson]

On Sun, 6 Oct 2002, Bertrik Sikken wrote:

> There is absolutely no way that the HP5400 will work with a backend for
> the HP3300c.

Well I have/had to start someplace! ;)  Are the protocols completely
different then? (only HP knows, I suppose)

...but I'll try to return it on Monday, and get an Epson instead.
(I even tried to rig up a windows box, but the installation programme
crashed of course, as it had under Wine a couple of hours before. So I
can't reverse-engineer it. Or use it a all.)

> In my experience, HP seems sympathetic to the cause but providing
> Linux drivers or specs for writing a driver is very low on their
> priority list.

That must be a policy decision. Surely they must have proper documentation
of the product's interfaces for internal use by testers, programmers etc.
All they have to do is publish that on the web, which only takes a couple
of minutes work. So my conclusion is they don't really want to. Ah well...

You know fifteen, twenty years ago when you bought a printer or a terminal,
you had the whole command set specified in the user manual. Nowadays,
manufacturers seem to be into some sort of "competition by obscurity."