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I have run a paperless business (and life, mostly) for the past 10 years. For some old-fashoned customers I always carried a Brother DS-mobile 600 portable docu
by LeonM 6y ago
I have run a paperless business (and life, mostly) for the past 10 years. For some old-fashoned customers I always carried a Brother DS-mobile 600 portable document scanner in my bag.
The scanner was expensive, but really nice. And it worked perfectly with MacOS 'capture' application that existed on Snowleapard (10.6).
However, Apple removed TWAIN support in MacOs Lion (10.7), and Brother refused to release updated drivers. The only way to use the scanner was using the horribly bloated third party scanning software, that was basically useless for document scanning (but it did allow you to draw a hat on the photo of your dog!). Up to this day they still market the scanner as 'MacOS compatible'.
Ironically, my scanner is now an expensive paperweight. Which makes it double useless, since I have no paper.
- Nextgrid 6y agoA solution (if you still need the scanner) is to use VueScan: https://www.hamrick.com https://www.hamrick.com It's an application that has its own (reverse-engineered) drivers for many USB scanners that doesn't depend on the system having support for it. I've used it and it works perfectly, though the UI is quite complex at first glance due to the amount of various configuration options it offers.
- LeonM 6y agoI did end up using VueScan, but not being impressed with it. My use case was scanning 1 or more pages into a PDF document. This was really easy to do with Apple's 'Capture' software. None of the alternatives (like VueScan) came close to the effectiveness of Capture. I remember also being quite annoyed that I had to spend more money on a VueScan license, just because Brother refused to release a compatible driver for a scanner that was then still sold as new and 'MacOS compatible'. This was not a cheap scanner, the least they could have done was to compensate the license cost of the piece of software that made their product usable.
- mattkevan 6y agoHaven’t used VueScan for ages, but it was essential in the early days of MacOS X. Most scanner makers wouldn’t release new drivers, so VueScan was the only way to get often quite expensive hardware working again.
- mobilio 6y agoVueScan it's good but doesn't helps if there isn't scanner drivers. I've have old ScanJet 3600C and it's still works flawless. But no drivers for new macOS versions. And short research found this: http://www.sane-project.org http://www.sane-project.org
- Nextgrid 6y agoThe point of VueScan is that it acts as its own driver; it accesses the scanner directly via USB without relying on an OS-level driver so it should work (they have a free trial version to test with).
- mobilio 6y agoI've trying trial version and doesn't works for me.
- LeonM 6y agoI've tried endlessly to get SANE running on OS-X back then (in the SnowLeopard days) and could never get it running. I guess I kind of lost my sanity with SANE ;-) Anyway, it wasn't a solution, extremely hacky at most. Not something what you want to spend your time on if you buy a scanner that is supposed to work with your OS.
- everdrive 6y agoInstall Linux?
- varispeed 6y agoIt seems like Apple takes the walled garden principle to its extremes. What harm TWAIN support was doing? Maybe they want the ability to see the documents users are scanning? Sometimes it could be a valuable source of IP.
- rasz 6y agoTry https://exactcode.com https://exactcode.com, has buildin scanner drivers.