[sane-devel] Microtek 4800 scanner

[abel deuring]

Dan wrote:

> I have seen some talk on sane2. It seems to me and keep in mind that
> I just converted to Linux this year, that we should be pushing for a
> scanner standard so we do not have to keep writing drivers forever.
> Most cameras seem to adhere to one of 2 standards. My GCC printer at
> first didn't seem to be supported but it followed 2 standards
> (postscript and pcl). All I needed to do was move the .PPD file over
> from windows to get the printer working. It seems that we should have
> a standard for scanners and a PPD equivalent that specifies the
> differences for each scanner.

congratulations that you bought a "Linux compatible" printer :)
There exist many cheaper "GDI printers" which leave much of the
render work to the Windows GDI. These machines often have a
proprietary interface that is not publicly documented.

The situation with scanners is similar: Two different USB chipsets
for scanners may work so differently that it does not make sense to
support them by a single driver/backend. Have a look into the source
code for example of the Plustek backend and of the gt68xx backend to
get a better idea :) And even for SCSI scanners, who are supposed to
support the same command set defined in the SCSI standard, there are
so many different extensions of the command parameters for different
scanners that it does not make sense at least for a project like
Sane to write a Grand Unified SCSI Scanner Driver: Most of the Sane
developers have access to only a few scanners, and writing software
that you can't properly test due to "missing" hardware is quite a
challenge.

Abel