[sane-devel] Accessing a scanner for a different reason

[m. allan noah]

On 8/15/07, Justin Rosen <rosen at nanotoon.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the feedback and help - I'm guessing most folks don't come
> onto the forums asking to rip these things apart and do strange
> projects with them :)

no, your specific request comes up every two months or so. we never
hear back from any of them, so its hard to say if we are giving good
advice or not :)

>
> It sounds like starting with the card scanner you've developed tools
> for would be a logical place to get my feet wet. Would it be possible
> to have a look at your SANE backend or libusb code for reference
> purposes?

the sane backend is open source. i can send you the libusb program.
but i dont know about running either of these things on windows, if
thats your platform.

>
> That being said, maybe you might know of some other scanners that are
> higher spec and also have good SANE support and libusb references..

<snip>

>
> *So here's what I think are some working specs: *
>
> Bus:
> USB 2.0 is where it's at.
>
> Sensor/Data:
> The scanner should be a CCD that uses white light illumination and
> gets RGB in a single pass, not color by color with R,G, and B colored
> lights.

both of those are pretty standard now.

>
> I realize that the lens will be an issue when removing the sensor
> from its intended case, but I can work around those optics. Also, the
> actual width of the sensor is not immediately important, but more
> compact would probably be better. What does matter is bit depth and
> DPI. I think 48 bit/16 bits per channel would be ideal, but 24 is a
> good place to start for testing purposes. I don't know much about how
> many pixels wide the typical scanner sensor is, but certainly the
> higher the DPI the better in my case - lets say over 1000 would be
> ideal.

ok, but understand that the lower 2 bits of those 16 bit scanners is
pretty much random noise, the available sensors are mostly really
10-14 bit, IIRC.

email me off-list if you want to talk about the cardscanner.

allan

-- 
"The truth is an offense, but not a sin"