[sane-devel] Sane + iscan + iee1394 + quality of colors

[Jean-Michel Pouré]

Dear friends,

I have been a happy sane and xsane user for years. I have two Epson 1660
Photo scanners and they work very well (maybe except warming up).

After a demonstration of sane and Digikam, my 60 year old uncle decided
to drop Windows and migrate to GNU/Linux. He would like to scan his 35
mm photos. He has several hundreds of them, maybe thousands. 

So I did some testings and I have some questions:

1) Sane + iscan

If I buy an Epson Perfection v350 or Epson Perfection v500, I guess I
have to use iscan. Is plugging sane into iscan a reliable solution?

Until now, I have only been using Sane native products. 
Are there known incompatibilities using sane with iscan?

2) ieee1394
The other possibility would be to buy a Perfection V700, which has USB +
ieee1394 and is fully supported by sane. 

Just two questions: 
+ Is scanning 35mm films faster using ieee1394
+ Does sane support the old or the new firewire stack or both? The
target system is a Debian SID, which only supports the new firewire
stack.
+ Is Sane ieee1394 more stable than USB scanning? I experienced some
warming problems with USB. Previously I had an SCSI scanner and it never
hanged during warm-up.

3) Quality of colors

I am planning 2400 dpi scans. More generaly, is there a wide difference
between the color grades of a low budget Epson v350 and a middle range
Epson v700? Is it worth spending more money for better colors. I did
some testing with my Epson 1660 Photo and the colors look okay after
correction. Can it bring better colors to spend more money?

Thank you very much for your time and efforts in developing Sane.

Kind regards,
Jean-Michel