[sane-devel] More of a hardware/SCSI question (Fujitsu fi-4750C)

[Mike Wirth]

Folks,

Sorry if this is off-topic, but this seems to be a good place to ask.  I
have a Fujitsu fi-4750C scanner with a SCSI interface, running happily from
an old ThinkPad with full dock and SCSI PCI card.  I'm using Adobe Acrobat
10 Pro as the scanning app (with OCR and ClearScan compression) with the
stock Fujitsu TWAIN driver, on WinXP SP3.

So far, so good, but with my tired old T23 ThinkPad, the OCR and ClearScan
processing is at least 4x slower than the scanner (over an hour for 80
pages of tech magazine at 300 dpi).  Seems like I have at least the
following options:

   1. Faster PC, e.g., compact desktop or server slice.  Probably the
   cheapest solution. Recommendations?  Appropriate benchmarks for which I can
   find published results in order to choose among the many options?
   2. Some sort of SCSI to Firewire (USB 2.0 is probably not good enough)
   bridge, so I can run the scanner from a Win XP VM running on one of my
   Intel Core 2 Duo MacBooks.  These things seem to be rare (and high priced).
    Whether they'll work in this situation is also an open question.
   3. Split the processing, running Acrobat on the ThinkPad, without OCR
   and compression, with scanned PDF on a network volume (on the MacBook).  Do
   OCR and Clearscan as a second step on the Mac side.  Works, but the
   uncompressed file is 10-20x larger and the network traffic is thus slow (at
   least when I did a short trial).  Maybe "sneakernet", i.e., physically
   moving a HD between systems would be better.

Any advice would be appreciated,

Mike
Palo Alto, CA

PS on fi-4750C maintenance: The Fujitsu maintenance kits for this scanner
are expensive, much more than I paid for the scanner :-) Any advice on
keeping it running on a shoestring.  Also, I get a few pixels of white
streaking when scanning solid block colors, e.g., a solid red banner across
a magazine cover.  Not sure they repeat in the exact same place.  May be
just the bottom sensor (when scanning duplex).  Is it likely dead pixels in
the sensor (or could it be dust in the optical path)?
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