[sane-devel] UMAX scanner problems

[Richard M. Teitel]

Developers,

First, let me apologize in advance for the length of this message.  I am 
trying to solve several problems, which I believe to be related.

I am running Red Hat Linux 8.0 on a 700 MHZ Pentium III using a UMAX 
Astra 3400 flatbed scanner connected to the USB port.  Red Hat came with 
sane-backends-1.0.8, which includes the sane-plustek.5.gz package (I'm 
not sure which release this is).  According to the documentation I've 
read, these are the most recent releases and should work with the UMAX 
scanner.  Indeed, the scanner is detected using modprobe (thanks to 
Henning), and I am able to run the scanner from either the XSANE 
front-end (version 0.84) or GIMP, using the Plustek backend.  I have 
successfully copied and faxed B&W images.  But all is not well :-(

First, the Preview function does not work.  When I run Preview, the 
scanner makes an odd "clicking" noise as it scans and does not produce 
an image.  I am able to use the Preview function to set the scan area, 
but that's all.

Second, the Lamp Off After Scan function does not work.  I set it for 
several different time intervals (from 5 to 30 seconds), but the lamp 
never turned off.  It does turn off when I close SANE, after I edited 
the Plustek driver to do so.  Also, the front panel "Power Saver" button 
does not turn off the lamp (according to the UMAX tech rep, the button 
sends a command to the software to turn the lamp off).  I suspect this 
problem leads to other problems having to do with overheating of the CCD 
sensor, since the quality of the first image is better than succeeding 
images.

Third, the quality of color images scanned from photographs is terrible. 
I have attached a copy of a color image scanned from a photograph.  The 
brightness, contrast and color of the photo are good.  The scanned 
images appear to be overexposed and "bloom" badly.  My initial thought 
was that the color saturation was way too high.  The problem gets worse 
as the scanner heats up (since the lamp doesn't shut off), and I have 
been unable to correct the brightness, contrast, or color settings 
enough to make the images look good.  I tried adjusting the brightness 
and contrast of the scanner using the SANE backend, and the quality 
improved some, but not much.  I have not tried scanning from the command 
line.

As a final note, I used to run this scanner under Win98SE using 
Vistascan and Photodeluxe and everything worked well, so I know the 
scanner works correctly.

I would very much appreciate any help you can offer.  I am not a 
developer, but have enough computer experience to do some 
trouble-shooting and file editing.

Thanks,
Rich Teitel
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