[sane-devel] Sending confirmation about the pixma backend

[Rogério Brito]

Dear people,

I just (yesterday night) bought myself a Canon PIXMA E4210 that I want to
use *purely* with Free Software.

In my limited hours with it, I found that the scanning wasn't working with
the programs in Debian testing nor sid but that I could make it work with an
USB cable if I installed sane-backends 1.0.28 (I actually grabbed a package
uploaded to mentors.debian.org).

Since I read the code and it mentioned that it needed testers, here is a
report.  With the newer version of sane-backends, I can scan from the
flatbed, as expected, and it works as well as I could expect (minus the
fragility of this piece of hardware---disappointed with that, but that's not
software-related, of course).

Unfortunately, I can't scan from the ADF (which was one of the main reasons
for me to choose this printer instead of others--with money being a 2nd
factor, of course).

This is what I have in my dmesg logs:

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[ 8812.136212] amdgpu: [powerplay] VBIOS did not find boot engine clock value in dependency table. Using Memory DPM level 0!
[ 9138.020109] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 7 using xhci_hcd
[ 9138.170011] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=04a9, idProduct=1855, bcdDevice= 1.02
[ 9138.170020] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 9138.170024] usb 1-1: Product: E4200 series
[ 9138.170028] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Canon
[ 9138.170032] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: 103CD1
[ 9138.282978] usblp 1-1:1.1: usblp1: USB Bidirectional printer dev 7 if 1 alt 0 proto 2 vid 0x04A9 pid 0x1855
[ 9138.284546] usblp 1-1:1.2: usblp2: USB Bidirectional printer dev 7 if 2 alt 0 proto 2 vid 0x04A9 pid 0x1855
[ 9138.284573] usbcore: registered new interface driver usblp
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

With scanimage, this is what I get:

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$ scanimage -L
device `pixma:04A91855_103CD1' is a CANON Canon PIXMA E4200 Series multi-function peripheral
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Making sure that there is a paper in the flatbed:

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$ time scanimage --device=pixma:04A91855_103CD1 --progress --mode=Lineart --resolution=600 --format=png --gamma=1 > out.png
Progress: 100.0%
real	0m21.907s
user	0m1.375s
sys	0m0.323s
$ file out.png
out.png: PNG image data, 5104 x 7016, 1-bit grayscale, non-interlaced
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Now, making sure that there are sheets of paper on the ADF:

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$ scanadf -d pixma:04A91855_103CD1 --mode Lineart --gamma 1 --output-file foo%02d.pnm
Scanned document foo01.pnm
scanadf: sane_read: Error during device I/O
Error during device I/O
Scanned 1 pages
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What was scanned is the page from the flatbed, not from the ADF.

If, OTOH, I specify something like:

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$ scanadf -d pixma:04A91855_103CD1 --mode Lineart --gamma 1 --source "Automatic Document Feeder" --output-file foo%02d.pbm
scanadf: sane_read: Document feeder out of documents
Scanned 0 pages
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The printer doesn't do anything, nothing moves etc.  The ADF works if I tell
it to scan from my Android device (but, then, the Canon app doesn't allow me
to specify resolution, nor if I want B/W images etc.---yes, it's that
limited).

So, in essence, there is partial success with the pixma backend and this
device. If there is anything that I can answer before I return this device
(unfortunately, I'm not really sure that I can return it, but I will try
it), then, please let me know and I will test whatever is desired.

In the case of it being possible to return this device and get something
else in its place, which manufacturer/model would be preferred to have
*full* functionality with Free Software only? Any recommendations?



Thanks,

Rogério Brito.


-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://cynic.cc/blog/ : github.com/rbrito : profiles.google.com/rbrito
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br