[sane-devel] Scanning negatives with Epson Perferction 1260 Photo

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Sat, Aug 02, 2003 at 10:49:49AM +0100, Jonathan Buzzard wrote:
> I simply will not stop, there is no SANE based solution that comes
> close to offering the facilities that VueScan does. For starters the
> SANE standard simply does not support some of the required features
> that negative/film scanners provide. So until there is a SANE 2 standard
> I simply cannot write a front end that matches VueScan or any other
> piece of production negative/film scanning software.

I've asked multiple times for concrete proposals how the standard can
be changed or appended. Each time there hasn't been any response. With
"concrete proposals" I mean patches to SANE2 or at least the text of
the to-be-added well-known options.

If I remember correctly, we came to the conclusion that most proposed
features can be done by adding well-known options (like multi-pass,
selection of a specific range of images, auto/manual focus) and
providing the functionality in the backend. So please send proposals.

The latest (well, it's rather old) SANE 2 draft is here:
http://www.meier-geinitz.de/sane/sane2/

If none of the people who use film scanners provide the necessary
changes, they won't be done.

> People come here looking for solutions to real problems. In my opinion
> and that of many others SANE is currently unsuitable for production
> scanning of negatives. I will not stop pointing people who require
> solutions today and not next year to possible solutions commercial or
> otherwise.

I personally don't mind pointing people to other solutions like
vuescan. I'm doing that myself e.g. in Usenet if there is no SANE
driver. But that shouldn't stop us from investigating what's actually
wrong with SANE, or more specifically, the backend.

The original author is talking about stripes in the scan. That's not a
problem of missing infrastructure in SANE or something like this. It's
either a bug/missing feature in the backend or a hardware limitation.

I can't talk about that specific scanner, but with my Mustek BearPaw
flatbed scanner I also get too much noise with dark slides or
negatives. With those scanners I didn't have trouble to get good
images from brighter negatives when using XSanes film selection option
by the way.

Bye,
  Henning