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Vuescan – Software support for 6500 abandoned scanners

310 points by unixhero 5y ago

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
I have been receiving the promised lifetime free updates for VueScan for 19 years. Does it have the friendliest interface? No. Does it display a commitment to legacy hardware that shames even open source? Yes.
- buserror 5y ago
  Same here, it's like GraphicConverter, no brainer buying a licence now and then. In the case of VueScan, I wouldn't really need it as I don't use it often, but it counts as 'asset' instead of feeling like i'm a cow to be milked.
funny_falcon 5y ago
Just tried with Canon TS6340 (which claimed to be supported). Doesn't work at all. To be honestly, TS6340 is bad creature (as a scanner). I regret buying it. Well, as a printer it is ok.
mrjin 5y ago
Really thought it was a good idea until I saw the price tag. I would say for most home users go get a new and supported printer/scanner might actually a cheaper and better solution, though not that environment friendly.
- Pinus 5y ago
  In the early days of Vuescan, you got unlimited updates for something like $40 and, as far as I can tell, those agreements are still being honoured. I suppose Hamrick could have said "Sorry, your license is for Vuescan, but now it’s vu-scan, that’s different", but he hasn’t.
  - NaOH 5y ago
    I purchased a lifetime license 16 years ago for US $90. Indeed, the license I have is as valid as ever.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      Hamrick is an upstanding guy who deserves a lot of respect for the way he’s run his business for over 20 years now. He seems like a one man shop that just never sells out and goes on indefinitely. I guess the software will die when he does. Startups are all the rage on HN but here is a great example of a lifestyle business that is long-lived and well-respected by many.
      - NaOH 5y ago
        Well said. Also in the Mac world—I can't speak to other platforms—I'd say your description of Hamrick the person and business also applies to Peter Lewis, the person behind Keyboard Maestro.
        jcdny 5y ago
        My license from 1999 is still valid. I originally purchased it for doing slide scanning on an LS-2000 and once I stopped shooting film I did not use vuescan until a few years ago when I needed to do a bunch of flatbed scans. I was pleased (and rather surprised) that it still worked. I then purchased a standard edition license as a thank you for what to my mind was a remarkably principled commitment to his promise of a lifetime license.
        TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
        Great story. It is also worth mentioning that Ed Hamrick himself answers all support emails. They are only a sentence or two, but it’s just a remarkable thing.
- SanchoPanda 5y ago
  And also install their spyware/crapware, deal with terrible performance, watch it fail every update, etc. Vuscan is a gem for making computers just work the way people assume they should. I used to have deal with printer/scanner problems regularly for a particular family member; now I sometimes proactively ask to see if any issues have arisen - nope. It has just been working across two printers and a major OS upgrade.
  - vanderZwan 5y ago
    > And also install their spyware/crapware, deal with terrible performance, watch it fail every update, etc. Just to clarify: you mean the software that comes with new scanners, not Vuescan, right?
    - mrjin 5y ago
      For sure he meant that.
  - mrjin 5y ago
    Not necessarily true. I have one mono laser printer and one color MFP for almost 7 years now, both were dirt cheap and now both are still going strong, nothing to complain really.
    - Moru 5y ago
      My Brother printer becomes 20 years next year. It's still working as new, have changed drum once and the support page on Brother even says it supports windows 10 and yes it does, it just worked. No extra installation needed. My Brother MFP (scanner, printer) I found in a second hand store for 10 euro, also just works but is a bit newer.
      - Reason077 5y ago
        Interesting. I had a Brother duplex wi-fi laser printer die on me last year. It was about 10 years old but had led a very sheltered life - only on its 2nd or 3rd toner. Didn’t seem to be anything mechanically wrong with it, but one day it just stopped printing or receiving commands properly. Still booted up ok and menus were responsive, but would freeze up on any attempt to print, even a test page. Sad day, but I’ve learned to live without a printer now.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- prmoustache 5y ago
  A much cheaper and better solution is to use an opensource OS that use Sane. I ditched it 2y ago when I changed country but I have been using an old usb scanner whose latest drivers were only installable on windows ME and 2000 for years on my different linux distros. If you don't want to use linux as your main OS, most virtualization solutions support USB forwarding and shared folders which allow one to scan on a vm and get the files directly on the host OS.
  - mrjin 5y ago
    You were absolutely right about that. The catch is that for fair bits of ordinary users, they might even be struggling using Windows, and maintaining a VM under Linux would be a huge undertaking. Don't take me wrong, I'm not saying Linux is not good but rather than it's still fair bit of work to be done for ordinary users. I used Windows for almost two decades now, and I'm now at the verge to ditch Windows myself...
    - prmoustache 5y ago
      I don't think the task is hard but it requires patience as nothing is more complicated but you need to learn to do everything in a somewhat different way. Despite being a sysadmin I have always been clear with my partners that I would never provide support for their windows computer. If they were willing to switch to linux they could and I would help them, otherwise they were on their own. I never tried forcing anyone. Might look extreme but after a day of work I didn't want to fight an OS/ecosystem I hated for its lack of transparency while I could rest or spend quality time. When I was married to my first wife we had only one computer that I configured with dual boot so she sometimes used my linux to browse something when I had it open as she didn't care about rebooting and thus ended up curious. After some kind of frustration on windows she started learning a bit deeper how to do things on Linux (I was using slackware at the time!). The thing is she was unemployed at the time so had plenty of time to learn. She was also interested in illustration and we were simply too broke to buy the Adobe Suite so she started using sodipodi and then its fork inkscape that weren't initially ported on windows and gimp. Later on when we divorced she kept that computer as I had purchased a laptop. I have lost contact now but 5y later she told me she had been given a faster one from friends and had replaced the windows that came with it with an ubuntu. My 2 subsequent long-time partners never did the switch. I believe the difference is not that they are more clueless about computer but with kids and/or a job it leaves little time to dedicate on learning something new despite all the frustration and swearing they get from their windows computer. Current partner is frustrated a lot as her windows 10 simply takes ages to boot and be usable so she sometimes borrow the laptop I dedicate to my daughters which runs on Fedora when she want to consult something quick. Main barrier I guess is the data she already has on the original computer which I patiently wait for it to die or she throw it through the window. I did an exception with my no support rule to set up some backups so she doesn't lose anything when it will happen
- elcapitan 5y ago
  I have been trying to replace my old Canoscan LIDE 200 with a newer LIDE 400 for some time now (because I have a line of dead pixels), but there actually seems to be a scanner shortage on the German hardware market right now. Might be related to Covid and people buying scanners to work from home. For Canon definitely, but some other manufacturers seem to be sparse and more expensive as well. So this is a welcome alternative to at least be able to upgrade my MacOS finally.
boondaburrah 5y ago
Every time I've tried it it's been an absolutely hellish experience. It abstracts too much of what the scanner driver is doing. I don't know what units it's doing things in. It snaps input numbers to the nearest number the scanner driver supports (if I enter "5" it'll change to "4.998" after a second), but again, I have no idea what it's actually measuring because everything's in scaled floats when it shouldn't be. Auto exposure uh... happens, but I don't get to know what it's decided, nor can I set it manually. I can "lock" the auto exposure for all frames in a strip, or I can add or subtract from the auto-chosen value. Do I get to choose the value though? Nope. If it runs out of ram it just deletes previews and makes you scan them again when you go scroll back to them (you can increase the ram limit in settings to mitigate this), losing your settings for that image. All in all, I'm glad I can use my scanner at all, but it's too buggy and I wish they would let me pay for their huge amount of reverse engineering effort as a driver and write my own TWAIN software on top. From what I understand it's just a two-man team behind it and I think it's just too much to expect them to maintain the amount of complexity they've signed on for, so I can't be mad. However, it does sound a lot like that FSF/GPL origin story where RMS got mad he couldn't fix something in the printer software.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  I can’t relate at all. I bought it because I couldn’t get any of the scan tools to work. OCR also worked fine. It’s not as nice of a user experience as pressing the scan snap button and have it show up on the NAS but it works nonetheless.
  - boondaburrah 5y ago
    I am trying to scan usually about 40 negatives at one time so I may be hitting every one of it's weak points in one go.
vanderZwan 5y ago
My father texted me the other day with the question of how to get his old Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400 running again. I suggested trying Vuescan - IIRC it used to be possible to use Vuescan drivers with the original software too. A few hours later he replied "hmm, well, I prefer the original software and I can't get that running, but according to the box [of the scanner] it should work with Windows XP." So in the end my dad managed to find an old XP computer from 2005 somewhere in his attic, set it up (without internet of course) just to scan his old negatives and slides, then does all the actual editing work on his new laptop. It works but the old computer is clearly the bottleneck. I think the next time I visit him I'll try to get the software running with Vuescan instead, it probably would be faster (the scanning software always uses 100% of the CPU while scanning, so that might actually be more of a bottleneck than the USB2.0 connection). Plus I wouldn't mind supporting the developers behind it. (also, re:"get a new scanner", I'm not sure how slide scanners these days would compare to that 5400. Sometimes technology peaks and then gets worse, especially on the consumer end as the market shrinks, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is true for film scanning tech)
- boondaburrah 5y ago
  "get a new scanner" doesn't work when no currently manufactured scanners have the same features that some of the old ones did. In particular, anything involving film scanning seems to involve painful use of film holders when 35mm has sprockets for a reason. I suppose I should be happy I never bought into APS film :P
  - invoke 5y ago
    I did, and that's why the Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV is a great scanner as it automatically winds through the APS films scanning each film. Vuescan was a life saver to be able to continue using my scanner!
  - paulmd 5y ago
    Very few scanners will use sprocket transport for 35mm, really just minilabs doing scanning before it's sliced I'd think. Also much of the film community leans towards medium format/large format (if you're going to the hassle of dealing with film, make it worth it in quality, basically) which don't have sprocket holes at all. Virtually all film scanners past and present use a film holder to make the film easier for the scanner (and the human) to manipulate and to offload the problem of film flatness to a sub-assembly. That's completely normal imo. You are correct though that the film scanner market is dead as a doornail, film isn't exactly a high-volume business (however, afaik it is slowly growing however - that market hit bottom in the early '10s and Kodak/Ilford sales are growing these days). The entire market consists of the Epson V600 at the low end, Epson V850 Pro at the high end, and then Hasselblad makes the Flextight line at the professional end ($12-15k). Then you've got various old/discontinued models with varying level of support. So VueScan is really doing a solid here keeping that hardware in service. One of these days I need to upgrade my V500 (predecessor to the v600) to a V850 so I can do large format on a flatbed. Right now I am using a Polaroid SprintScan 45 Ultra (which is a SCSI scanner that is only supported on VueScan anymore). I would love a Flextight but it's not justifiable and the options for a modern CCD (which, in parlance, is basically the opposite of a flatbed) are nonexistent other than that.
FooBarWidget 5y ago
I've been using VueScan for years and it's great. Not sure why so many naysayers. My main use case for VueScan is scanning lots of pages in a document while performing necessary cropping and rotation and color correction on each page, and possibly saving the end result in a multi-page PDF. The builtin scanner in macOS allows either previewing, or scanning into a file, but it can't save the preview into a file. Previwing is crucial in order to determine what to crop or rotate, but scanning another time after the preview wastes a lot of time. The builtin scanner can rotate, but it can't preview the rotation. It has limited color correction capability (which is important for making black & white documents... more black & white, and well-readable). It can't save to multi page PDF. It can't tweak JPEG quality. It can't preview in color but save in black & white. And OCR. Damn, so nice. It can generate PDFs with selectable and searchable text! VueScan can do all of that. Strongly recommended if you need to scan more than a few pages on a regular basis. Well worth the price tag. The only downside is that its UI is a bit complicated, with lots of settings. It should be regarded a power user tool. When I buy furniture or another appliance, I throw away the paper manual and store the digitally scanned version. It's hard to find paper documents: there are too many. In comparison, finding digital documents is trivial.
- anonymousiam 5y ago
  I purchased a copy when Windows 7 did not support my HP ScanJet 2100c. The 25-year-old scanner was built to a higher quality standard than current products, and is still working great.
- thanatos519 5y ago
  > The only downside is that its UI is a bit complicated, with lots of settings. It should be regarded a power user tool. That's not a downside for me. I always found bundled scanner software to be an oversimplified nightmare, though admittedly I haven't seen any for 20 years thanks to VueScan.
  - wingi 5y ago
    It is easy, works with old scanner and I am happy with that UI!
Semaphor 5y ago
Vuescan recently saved me when I was trying to get my first scanner to work, simply by actually managing to scan. That way, I knew that at least the scanner wasn’t broken, and I simply needed to figure out what was wrong (turns out the Canon driver hates it when your Windows region does not match your language and number formats…). After getting the original software to run, I didn’t need Vuescan again, but I thought it was a cool tool.
- estaseuropano 5y ago
  Is vuescan not a safer choice? Epson, canon and hp software tend to do automatic updates and may choose to brick your device if you use the wrong ink. They also tend to collect data unless you carefully fight every setting. Why even expose yourself to that? I only biy oki and brother printers for this reason - fine tech without the evil.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    It’s a document scanner. Not much ink in there ;) And haven’t seen any data connection when scanning.
    - estaseuropano 5y ago
      Ok true for a pure scanner these might indeed be fine. Too few ways for the manufactured to additionally fleece you :-)
rcarmo 5y ago
This was so good. I was sad to realize the iOS app was unmaintained (or at least not updated for a good while) a few years ago, and eventually got a new scanner that “just worked” with Preview on the Mac, but I do recommend VueScan overall. It’s a remarkable piece of software.
jl6 5y ago
I retain a Windows VM specifically and solely to run a scanner driver for my ten year old ScanSnap S1500. It works just fine!
- sleepless 5y ago
  Why? Fujitsu finally came to their senses and their latest ScanSnap software supports S1500 on current macOS (and windows?).
  - jl6 5y ago
    Because I don’t run macOS or Windows as my primary OS.
  - ericbarrett 5y ago
    Requires a cloud account though, doesn't it? The old non-connected 32-bit did not, so when MacOS dropped 32-bit support I switched to VueScan. "Cloud-enabled" is strictly a liability when scanning legal and financial documents.
- thisisjasononhn 5y ago
  Hi, Just wanted to point out that the SANE project has complete support for the ScanSnap S1500.[1] I can highly recommend using xsane [2] (the graphical front-end application from the SANE project) with your host OS, makes it all much more streamlined. I am writing up documentation myself about using the S1300i on Linux, it's a great device. [1] http://sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html http://sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html [2] http://www.fifi.org/doc/xsane/html/sane-xsane-doc.html http://www.fifi.org/doc/xsane/html/sane-xsane-doc.html
  - jl6 5y ago
    I did look into using SANE (many years ago now) but I couldn’t find any equivalent to the Fujitsu software to do things like auto-rotate, auto-de-skew, control over multi-page PDF output, long page scanning, continuous scanning, … a ton of stuff that the ScanSnap Manager does to make it all smooth and easy. I’d be interested in reading your writeup, particularly if something has changed in the last few years.
muhehe 5y ago
When I see software like this, I'm glad it exists. Simultaneous I'm piseed there is need for software like this.
7839284023 5y ago
I love Vuescan. The UI could use a bit of polishing, but the software works perfectly. Just don't use the build in OCR function. For some reason it always made many errors compared to OCRmyPDF (Tesseract OCR) [1]. Sadly the Vuescan AUR package (unofficial) [2] breaks several times a week because of sha256sum check miss-match since the Vuescan developer pushes many silent updates. Also the developer behind Vuescan is against other downloading options [3]. [1] https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF. [2] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/vuescan-bin https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/vuescan-bin [3] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2021-May/036313.html https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2021-May/0...
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Tesseract is the best free OCR by far though.. That's a big standard to compare to.
t0bia_s 5y ago
It is perfect software for Epson v850 Pro. I'm using it for digitalisation of my father's photo archive full of negatives and diapositives (around 30000 pictures). With Negative Lab Pro possibilities for solid digitalisation from analogue at home are unlimited.
qwerty456127 5y ago
This is an extremely awesome app. The fact it is a native (no-electron) multi-platform app is especially great.
- paxys 5y ago
  Vuescan was released 15 years before electron..
iforgotpassword 5y ago
I tried it for a magazine scanner, powerslide X or something a year ago. I couldn't get the exposure right. With single exposure, you got strong halo effects on rather dark images that had small, bright spots (reflections on small objects, eyes). So I tried multi-exposure which is also recommended with the official software for the scanner. But it seemed to mis-calculate something here. According to the scanner's manual, in this mode, the scanner takes three samples at different exposure times. I don't know what vuescan did wrong here, but on brighter images the scanner made "weird noises" and I got weird stripes in the final image. Darker photos worked just fine. The irony here is that despite vuescan being really customizable, totally overwhelming the first time you switch to advanced mode, there didn't seem to be a way to manually adjust the three individual exposure times, which I would totally have expected. Just a single slider. I was suspecting it would help to mitigate the issue in some way. That said, while this was mostly an issue with that specific scanner (no idea if they even have all the scanners at hand to test them, seems rather unlikely that they have a warehouse full of 6500 scanners ready to scan), in general the software was awesome. My plan was scanning about 10k slides and have it save the original scan without any further processing as a 16bpc tif, then autocrop, color correct and save as jpeg. Easily done with vuescan. Where I couldn't figure out things on my own, documentation helped out. Compare that to "Silverfast AI". Just to get a download of the trial version they wanted an email address. Strike one. Then the UI, it was just oversimplified and make to look cool, using its own theming entirely. To add insult to injury, it seems this was a rather recent overhaul, and many of the howtos on the web referred to a completely different gui layout. Strike two. And even after fiddling with the gui for a while, I failed to get a baseline setup that would just scan the image, use infrared dust removal, autocrop and nothing else. For some reason, there was always still some color boosting and sharpening going on, driving me crazy. Strike three. It also crashed twice, which is probably due to shitty drivers - the software that came with the device crashed too.[1] Uninstalled after this experience. But obviously, to get another strike, they kept spamming me with "hey wanna buy our crap" until I just deleted the mail alias I used for them. [1] Another bonus point for vuescan - it spawns a separate process for communicating with the scanner, completely eliminating that source for crashes.
invoke 5y ago
I've been using this for 10 years. It's a fantastic piece of software and allows me to continue to use a Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV without any issues! My APS films are still scannable! Woop woop!
deleted 5y ago
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dawidloubser 5y ago
I have been focusing on film-based photography for 15+ years - mostly printing in the darkroom, but also often scanning - and can wholeheartedly recommend Vuescan on Linux. About 6 years ago, however, I switched exclusively to the open-source XSane [1] and it operates my old scanner(s) beautifully, with all features including the transparency unit. Try it out if you don't have a highly unusual scanner with driver issues. My workflow involves: 1. XSane for scanning (to 16bit TIFF) 2. exiftool [2] to tag my images with full metadata from my notes: camera, lens, aperture, film, datetime etc just like your digital camera would 3. Darktable [3] to manage my library, cropping, sharpening, adjustments, and tagging It's a little bit of work - but nowhere near as much as taking and processing 4x5in photographs, and the "digital end results" are very satisfactory. If I may, an example image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dawidloubser/35944112383 https://www.flickr.com/photos/dawidloubser/35944112383 [1] http://www.sane-project.org/ http://www.sane-project.org/ [2] https://exiftool.org/ https://exiftool.org/ [3] https://www.darktable.org/ https://www.darktable.org/
- mobilio 5y ago
  I'm also using Sane for scanning on macOS. Because ScanJet doesn't have support.
- _aavaa_ 5y ago
  I also used to do flatbed scanning, and at one point even bought a scanner build to scan film. Recently though I switched to just using my digital camera and a macro lens to scan the film, and the difference is unbelievable. I found the digital camera better than the scanner in terms of just about everything.
  - EricE 5y ago
    Do you have a jig to hold the phone/lens? Will have to look into this!
    - _aavaa_ 5y ago
      Yes. I ended up making one with parts and 3D printing. But there are plenty to buy. Mine is build as follows: 1. I’m using threaded hoods to attach to my lens and create a cylinder extending out. 2. I have a second piece which slides over the end of the tube with a bit of movement closer/further from the sensor to fiddle with focus and magnification. 3. The piece that fits over the tube has a piece to hold the film and show only one exposure at a time. Behind the film is a diffuser and a light source.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
This has been around for a very long time. I made my living, writing the corporate-sponsored software for some of the scanners VueScan supports. I was often goaded by “VueScan does this, so we need to do it, as well.” Hamrick is an awesome engineer, and it’s kind of heartwarming to see that he’s still going, like a big pink rabbit, banging a drum.
MarinaAlapont 5y ago
elcapitan 5y ago
This looks promising for my old Canon scanner.. I couldn't find out what the "advanced features" of the Professional version are, did someone see a feature comparison chart?
MrDresden 5y ago
Not directly related, but this reminded me of some reverse engineering work I did some years ago at a laboratory that was using a 17 year old, but still fully functioning, medical eye scanner whose companion software was so old that it had become increasingly difficult to run it. The software was released in 1999 with only one minor update in 2001. Even the manufacturer had lost all instances of the software, and once we contacted them to ask for guidence, they were not able to give any and in fact ended asking us to send them the software so that they would have a copy of it. And so we decided to completely reverse engineer the serial data connection and recreate the analysis display. It did take around 3 months of work, with lots of testing, but we did it. Since then I often wonder how many medical devices are thrown out simply due to issues with the companion software, and how nice it would be if there was an initiative like this for writing FOSS drivers/software to interact with them.
- adolph 5y ago
  > how many medical devices are thrown out simply due to issues with the companion software If in the US, did y'all get FDA certification for the internally developed software? Did the vendor? https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/device-advice-comprehensive-regulatory-assistance/guidance-documents-medical-devices-and-radiation-emitting-products https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/device-advice-comprehens...
  - MrDresden 5y ago
    Not in the US, nor did the software relay anything back to the 'patient' in any way. They came in and gave permission for phenotype measurements for genetic studies.
sackerhews 5y ago
Nice project. After I had to throw away a perfectly fine and good scanner because it didn't have Windows 7 drivers (let alone Linux), I now only buy hardware that's properly supported on Linux.
vr46 5y ago
Ed Hamrick has been saving my arse since 2001, and my full licence from then is still honoured to this day. For real. Currently powering a Minolta Dimage 5400 II from the early 2000s and I really ought to find a way of giving the guy more money. Excellent software, ridiculously powerful, has kept my digital darkroom running for 21 years and counting.
oger 5y ago
Great piece of software - even if the user interface can be overwhelming and some features take time to figure out. But as a matter of fact I am able to continue using my old and trusty scanners even if software support by their vendors has stopped for many years. It was money well spent.
mattkevan 5y ago
Wow, that brings back some nostalgia. Very happy to hear they’re still going strong. Back in the early days of macOS, scanner manufacturers wouldn’t release compatible drivers for existing hardware, forcing you to buy a new one instead. Throwing away perfectly good hardware was a non-starter, so for a few years VueScan was the only way to use your scanner without having to boot into Classic. This became less of an issue with Image Capture and manufacturers realising that macOS wasn’t going to go away quietly, but VueScan saved the day for many a print designer at the time.
blunte 5y ago
I've also been using this for several years. It may have an old look in the UI, but it works very well and is reliable. Honestly, what more could you ask?
landswipe 5y ago
The only reason I keep a MacBook Pro lying around is this software and an old flatbed scanner :)
disruptiveink 5y ago
My feedback as a first time user is that it took me about four relaunches to figure out how to get to any kind of preferences, I couldn't figure out how to do anything beforehand. At least on macOS, VueScan > Preferences... does nothing when you're in "Basic" mode, it only switches you to the "Prefs" tab when you go to the "Input" and switch "Options" to "Standard" or "Professional". The app helpfully pops up a browser window at application close if it wasn't able to find a scanner, but it mentions nothing about how to do a manual set up. Would never in a million years think of looking in the "Input" tab to be able to see more preferences, I found it by sheer luck!
FreezingKeeper 5y ago
Another long-term Vuescan user here. From memory it was the Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X transition and lack of vendor support for the new OS that caused me to seek it out. The only thing I would love for them to add would be a way for the app to self-update.
deleted 5y ago
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dada78641 5y ago
I like VueScan just fine, but as far as I can tell you can't do this: https://i.imgur.com/mjt6ruf.png https://i.imgur.com/mjt6ruf.png - of course, correct me if I'm wrong. Being able to freely rotate the section you're scanning is an absolute killer feature if you're scanning things that you can't easily line up perfectly, like anything smaller than A4. Most of my scanning is for archival purposes, and I need them to be as high quality as possible, and I definitely couldn't do without this feature.
radarsat1 5y ago
Nothing to do with VueScan, but I just went through a journey trying to find a good solution for an old HP laserjet/scanner combo that I picked up used for $40. Although it's not wifi enabled, and has no Mac support (that I need for a couple of laptops in my household), I got it running perfectly on a Raspberry Pi, despite some difficulties with the HP driver "ecosystem". (Why do they make it so complicated..) Once I got it working, I set up `saned` and was able to scan from my Ubuntu laptop over wifi just fine using `gscan2pdf`, which has a horrible user interface but at least gets the job done. Honestly it was a bit surprising to me to discover how terrible the scanning landscape still is in open source software, but I guess it's just not one of those things that is needed that often so some basic projects that were thrown together a decade ago still kind of work and that's that. I can accept that. However, despite printing working fine for all machines, I absolutely could not manage to get any kind of "bridge" working for scanning from the Mac laptop, which apparently uses a different scanner API called TWAIN, and no amount of messing around with TWAIN/sane bridges worked out. Not to mention that one of the two Macs was a "work" laptop for which it was not allowed to install drivers or system software. The whole time I was thinking, man, all I want is some web interface where I can log into the RPi and drive the scanner, and download the result, why is that so difficult. Lo and behold I came across this amazing project that solved the whole problem for me: https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs. I'm not affiliated with it, but I was just so impressed at how well it worked that I feel the need to mention it, and give kudos to the author. It was even easy to get running, just a single docker command on the RPi and it was up and running. The laptops can connect easily, of course, because it's just a local web server, and you can do multipage scans to PDF, which is really all I wanted. Fantastic bit of OSS, highly recommended if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation. Forget remote protocols and installing drivers, etc., just run this on the Pi and you're in business.
johnnyballgame 5y ago
I first started using VueScan around 2000 with a Nikon LS-30 film scanner and hundreds of crappy APS cartridges. I've never had to pay a dime for updates ever since. And they are put out regularly to this day. Hats off to Ed Hamrick for a handy piece of software that just does what it's supposed to do.
Skiiing 5y ago
Thank you Vuescan for saving years of my life. I have a huge 35mm collection that I needed to scan and had acquired a Nikon Coolscan 5. Not only was the Nikon software unsupported on modern OSes, it had severely limited capabilities in terms of RAW and batch scanning. With Vuescan I was able to setup a workflow where I pop in a filmstrip, and it scanned them all with no user intervention and saved as both RAW and TIFF. Then when it ejected the filmstrip 15 minutes later I just fed in a new one. So I could have a normal work day alongside the task. Just superb software.
EricE 5y ago
Aww, no support for my old Thunerscan! On a more serious note, as bad as it was, it was an amazing value for the time. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Thunderscan.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Thunderscan.txt
- deleted 5y ago
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unD 5y ago
Never understood the reason why Hasselblad (formerly Imacon) scanners aren't part of the list. Given the street price of several thousands of dollars and the fact that Hasselblad has decided to discontinue them a few years ago, there would be a large audience of users willing to pay good money for it.
causi 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand the value proposition. Supporting abandoned scanners is great, but $40 for essentially a driver seems rather steep. That's half the cost of a brand new scanner that will work with whatever software I want.
UberFly 5y ago
Vuescan is my go-to scanning software even if the scanner is new. The author seems like a good dude too. Great deal if you scan a lot.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Nice, though it would be better if manufacturers would open source the drivers and not do planned obsolescence in the first place. And most drivers and manufacturer-provided scanning software are total and utter crap, which is something that open source drivers could really help with too.

310 points by unixhero 5y ago

I have been receiving the promised lifetime free updates for VueScan for 19 years. Does it have the friendliest interface? No. Does it display a commitment to legacy hardware that shames even open source? Yes.

buserror 5y ago
Same here, it's like GraphicConverter, no brainer buying a licence now and then. In the case of VueScan, I wouldn't really need it as I don't use it often, but it counts as 'asset' instead of feeling like i'm a cow to be milked.

funny_falcon 5y ago

Just tried with Canon TS6340 (which claimed to be supported). Doesn't work at all. To be honestly, TS6340 is bad creature (as a scanner). I regret buying it. Well, as a printer it is ok.

mrjin 5y ago

Really thought it was a good idea until I saw the price tag. I would say for most home users go get a new and supported printer/scanner might actually a cheaper and better solution, though not that environment friendly.

Pinus 5y ago
In the early days of Vuescan, you got unlimited updates for something like $40 and, as far as I can tell, those agreements are still being honoured. I suppose Hamrick could have said "Sorry, your license is for Vuescan, but now it’s vu-scan, that’s different", but he hasn’t.
- NaOH 5y ago
  I purchased a lifetime license 16 years ago for US $90. Indeed, the license I have is as valid as ever.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    Hamrick is an upstanding guy who deserves a lot of respect for the way he’s run his business for over 20 years now. He seems like a one man shop that just never sells out and goes on indefinitely. I guess the software will die when he does. Startups are all the rage on HN but here is a great example of a lifestyle business that is long-lived and well-respected by many.
    - NaOH 5y ago
      Well said. Also in the Mac world—I can't speak to other platforms—I'd say your description of Hamrick the person and business also applies to Peter Lewis, the person behind Keyboard Maestro.
      - jcdny 5y ago
        My license from 1999 is still valid. I originally purchased it for doing slide scanning on an LS-2000 and once I stopped shooting film I did not use vuescan until a few years ago when I needed to do a bunch of flatbed scans. I was pleased (and rather surprised) that it still worked. I then purchased a standard edition license as a thank you for what to my mind was a remarkably principled commitment to his promise of a lifetime license.
        TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
        Great story. It is also worth mentioning that Ed Hamrick himself answers all support emails. They are only a sentence or two, but it’s just a remarkable thing.
SanchoPanda 5y ago
And also install their spyware/crapware, deal with terrible performance, watch it fail every update, etc. Vuscan is a gem for making computers just work the way people assume they should. I used to have deal with printer/scanner problems regularly for a particular family member; now I sometimes proactively ask to see if any issues have arisen - nope. It has just been working across two printers and a major OS upgrade.
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  > And also install their spyware/crapware, deal with terrible performance, watch it fail every update, etc. Just to clarify: you mean the software that comes with new scanners, not Vuescan, right?
  - mrjin 5y ago
    For sure he meant that.
- mrjin 5y ago
  Not necessarily true. I have one mono laser printer and one color MFP for almost 7 years now, both were dirt cheap and now both are still going strong, nothing to complain really.
  - Moru 5y ago
    My Brother printer becomes 20 years next year. It's still working as new, have changed drum once and the support page on Brother even says it supports windows 10 and yes it does, it just worked. No extra installation needed. My Brother MFP (scanner, printer) I found in a second hand store for 10 euro, also just works but is a bit newer.
    - Reason077 5y ago
      Interesting. I had a Brother duplex wi-fi laser printer die on me last year. It was about 10 years old but had led a very sheltered life - only on its 2nd or 3rd toner. Didn’t seem to be anything mechanically wrong with it, but one day it just stopped printing or receiving commands properly. Still booted up ok and menus were responsive, but would freeze up on any attempt to print, even a test page. Sad day, but I’ve learned to live without a printer now.
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prmoustache 5y ago
A much cheaper and better solution is to use an opensource OS that use Sane. I ditched it 2y ago when I changed country but I have been using an old usb scanner whose latest drivers were only installable on windows ME and 2000 for years on my different linux distros. If you don't want to use linux as your main OS, most virtualization solutions support USB forwarding and shared folders which allow one to scan on a vm and get the files directly on the host OS.
- mrjin 5y ago
  You were absolutely right about that. The catch is that for fair bits of ordinary users, they might even be struggling using Windows, and maintaining a VM under Linux would be a huge undertaking. Don't take me wrong, I'm not saying Linux is not good but rather than it's still fair bit of work to be done for ordinary users. I used Windows for almost two decades now, and I'm now at the verge to ditch Windows myself...
  - prmoustache 5y ago
    I don't think the task is hard but it requires patience as nothing is more complicated but you need to learn to do everything in a somewhat different way. Despite being a sysadmin I have always been clear with my partners that I would never provide support for their windows computer. If they were willing to switch to linux they could and I would help them, otherwise they were on their own. I never tried forcing anyone. Might look extreme but after a day of work I didn't want to fight an OS/ecosystem I hated for its lack of transparency while I could rest or spend quality time. When I was married to my first wife we had only one computer that I configured with dual boot so she sometimes used my linux to browse something when I had it open as she didn't care about rebooting and thus ended up curious. After some kind of frustration on windows she started learning a bit deeper how to do things on Linux (I was using slackware at the time!). The thing is she was unemployed at the time so had plenty of time to learn. She was also interested in illustration and we were simply too broke to buy the Adobe Suite so she started using sodipodi and then its fork inkscape that weren't initially ported on windows and gimp. Later on when we divorced she kept that computer as I had purchased a laptop. I have lost contact now but 5y later she told me she had been given a faster one from friends and had replaced the windows that came with it with an ubuntu. My 2 subsequent long-time partners never did the switch. I believe the difference is not that they are more clueless about computer but with kids and/or a job it leaves little time to dedicate on learning something new despite all the frustration and swearing they get from their windows computer. Current partner is frustrated a lot as her windows 10 simply takes ages to boot and be usable so she sometimes borrow the laptop I dedicate to my daughters which runs on Fedora when she want to consult something quick. Main barrier I guess is the data she already has on the original computer which I patiently wait for it to die or she throw it through the window. I did an exception with my no support rule to set up some backups so she doesn't lose anything when it will happen
elcapitan 5y ago
I have been trying to replace my old Canoscan LIDE 200 with a newer LIDE 400 for some time now (because I have a line of dead pixels), but there actually seems to be a scanner shortage on the German hardware market right now. Might be related to Covid and people buying scanners to work from home. For Canon definitely, but some other manufacturers seem to be sparse and more expensive as well. So this is a welcome alternative to at least be able to upgrade my MacOS finally.

boondaburrah 5y ago

Every time I've tried it it's been an absolutely hellish experience. It abstracts too much of what the scanner driver is doing. I don't know what units it's doing things in. It snaps input numbers to the nearest number the scanner driver supports (if I enter "5" it'll change to "4.998" after a second), but again, I have no idea what it's actually measuring because everything's in scaled floats when it shouldn't be. Auto exposure uh... happens, but I don't get to know what it's decided, nor can I set it manually. I can "lock" the auto exposure for all frames in a strip, or I can add or subtract from the auto-chosen value. Do I get to choose the value though? Nope. If it runs out of ram it just deletes previews and makes you scan them again when you go scroll back to them (you can increase the ram limit in settings to mitigate this), losing your settings for that image. All in all, I'm glad I can use my scanner at all, but it's too buggy and I wish they would let me pay for their huge amount of reverse engineering effort as a driver and write my own TWAIN software on top. From what I understand it's just a two-man team behind it and I think it's just too much to expect them to maintain the amount of complexity they've signed on for, so I can't be mad. However, it does sound a lot like that FSF/GPL origin story where RMS got mad he couldn't fix something in the printer software.

rjzzleep 5y ago
I can’t relate at all. I bought it because I couldn’t get any of the scan tools to work. OCR also worked fine. It’s not as nice of a user experience as pressing the scan snap button and have it show up on the NAS but it works nonetheless.
- boondaburrah 5y ago
  I am trying to scan usually about 40 negatives at one time so I may be hitting every one of it's weak points in one go.

vanderZwan 5y ago

My father texted me the other day with the question of how to get his old Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400 running again. I suggested trying Vuescan - IIRC it used to be possible to use Vuescan drivers with the original software too. A few hours later he replied "hmm, well, I prefer the original software and I can't get that running, but according to the box [of the scanner] it should work with Windows XP." So in the end my dad managed to find an old XP computer from 2005 somewhere in his attic, set it up (without internet of course) just to scan his old negatives and slides, then does all the actual editing work on his new laptop. It works but the old computer is clearly the bottleneck. I think the next time I visit him I'll try to get the software running with Vuescan instead, it probably would be faster (the scanning software always uses 100% of the CPU while scanning, so that might actually be more of a bottleneck than the USB2.0 connection). Plus I wouldn't mind supporting the developers behind it. (also, re:"get a new scanner", I'm not sure how slide scanners these days would compare to that 5400. Sometimes technology peaks and then gets worse, especially on the consumer end as the market shrinks, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is true for film scanning tech)

boondaburrah 5y ago
"get a new scanner" doesn't work when no currently manufactured scanners have the same features that some of the old ones did. In particular, anything involving film scanning seems to involve painful use of film holders when 35mm has sprockets for a reason. I suppose I should be happy I never bought into APS film :P
- invoke 5y ago
  I did, and that's why the Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV is a great scanner as it automatically winds through the APS films scanning each film. Vuescan was a life saver to be able to continue using my scanner!
- paulmd 5y ago
  Very few scanners will use sprocket transport for 35mm, really just minilabs doing scanning before it's sliced I'd think. Also much of the film community leans towards medium format/large format (if you're going to the hassle of dealing with film, make it worth it in quality, basically) which don't have sprocket holes at all. Virtually all film scanners past and present use a film holder to make the film easier for the scanner (and the human) to manipulate and to offload the problem of film flatness to a sub-assembly. That's completely normal imo. You are correct though that the film scanner market is dead as a doornail, film isn't exactly a high-volume business (however, afaik it is slowly growing however - that market hit bottom in the early '10s and Kodak/Ilford sales are growing these days). The entire market consists of the Epson V600 at the low end, Epson V850 Pro at the high end, and then Hasselblad makes the Flextight line at the professional end ($12-15k). Then you've got various old/discontinued models with varying level of support. So VueScan is really doing a solid here keeping that hardware in service. One of these days I need to upgrade my V500 (predecessor to the v600) to a V850 so I can do large format on a flatbed. Right now I am using a Polaroid SprintScan 45 Ultra (which is a SCSI scanner that is only supported on VueScan anymore). I would love a Flextight but it's not justifiable and the options for a modern CCD (which, in parlance, is basically the opposite of a flatbed) are nonexistent other than that.

FooBarWidget 5y ago

I've been using VueScan for years and it's great. Not sure why so many naysayers. My main use case for VueScan is scanning lots of pages in a document while performing necessary cropping and rotation and color correction on each page, and possibly saving the end result in a multi-page PDF. The builtin scanner in macOS allows either previewing, or scanning into a file, but it can't save the preview into a file. Previwing is crucial in order to determine what to crop or rotate, but scanning another time after the preview wastes a lot of time. The builtin scanner can rotate, but it can't preview the rotation. It has limited color correction capability (which is important for making black & white documents... more black & white, and well-readable). It can't save to multi page PDF. It can't tweak JPEG quality. It can't preview in color but save in black & white. And OCR. Damn, so nice. It can generate PDFs with selectable and searchable text! VueScan can do all of that. Strongly recommended if you need to scan more than a few pages on a regular basis. Well worth the price tag. The only downside is that its UI is a bit complicated, with lots of settings. It should be regarded a power user tool. When I buy furniture or another appliance, I throw away the paper manual and store the digitally scanned version. It's hard to find paper documents: there are too many. In comparison, finding digital documents is trivial.

anonymousiam 5y ago
I purchased a copy when Windows 7 did not support my HP ScanJet 2100c. The 25-year-old scanner was built to a higher quality standard than current products, and is still working great.
thanatos519 5y ago
> The only downside is that its UI is a bit complicated, with lots of settings. It should be regarded a power user tool. That's not a downside for me. I always found bundled scanner software to be an oversimplified nightmare, though admittedly I haven't seen any for 20 years thanks to VueScan.
- wingi 5y ago
  It is easy, works with old scanner and I am happy with that UI!

Semaphor 5y ago

Vuescan recently saved me when I was trying to get my first scanner to work, simply by actually managing to scan. That way, I knew that at least the scanner wasn’t broken, and I simply needed to figure out what was wrong (turns out the Canon driver hates it when your Windows region does not match your language and number formats…). After getting the original software to run, I didn’t need Vuescan again, but I thought it was a cool tool.

estaseuropano 5y ago
Is vuescan not a safer choice? Epson, canon and hp software tend to do automatic updates and may choose to brick your device if you use the wrong ink. They also tend to collect data unless you carefully fight every setting. Why even expose yourself to that? I only biy oki and brother printers for this reason - fine tech without the evil.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  It’s a document scanner. Not much ink in there ;) And haven’t seen any data connection when scanning.
  - estaseuropano 5y ago
    Ok true for a pure scanner these might indeed be fine. Too few ways for the manufactured to additionally fleece you :-)

rcarmo 5y ago

This was so good. I was sad to realize the iOS app was unmaintained (or at least not updated for a good while) a few years ago, and eventually got a new scanner that “just worked” with Preview on the Mac, but I do recommend VueScan overall. It’s a remarkable piece of software.

jl6 5y ago

I retain a Windows VM specifically and solely to run a scanner driver for my ten year old ScanSnap S1500. It works just fine!

sleepless 5y ago
Why? Fujitsu finally came to their senses and their latest ScanSnap software supports S1500 on current macOS (and windows?).
- jl6 5y ago
  Because I don’t run macOS or Windows as my primary OS.
- ericbarrett 5y ago
  Requires a cloud account though, doesn't it? The old non-connected 32-bit did not, so when MacOS dropped 32-bit support I switched to VueScan. "Cloud-enabled" is strictly a liability when scanning legal and financial documents.
thisisjasononhn 5y ago
Hi, Just wanted to point out that the SANE project has complete support for the ScanSnap S1500.[1] I can highly recommend using xsane [2] (the graphical front-end application from the SANE project) with your host OS, makes it all much more streamlined. I am writing up documentation myself about using the S1300i on Linux, it's a great device. [1] http://sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html http://sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html [2] http://www.fifi.org/doc/xsane/html/sane-xsane-doc.html http://www.fifi.org/doc/xsane/html/sane-xsane-doc.html
- jl6 5y ago
  I did look into using SANE (many years ago now) but I couldn’t find any equivalent to the Fujitsu software to do things like auto-rotate, auto-de-skew, control over multi-page PDF output, long page scanning, continuous scanning, … a ton of stuff that the ScanSnap Manager does to make it all smooth and easy. I’d be interested in reading your writeup, particularly if something has changed in the last few years.

muhehe 5y ago

When I see software like this, I'm glad it exists. Simultaneous I'm piseed there is need for software like this.

7839284023 5y ago

I love Vuescan. The UI could use a bit of polishing, but the software works perfectly. Just don't use the build in OCR function. For some reason it always made many errors compared to OCRmyPDF (Tesseract OCR) [1]. Sadly the Vuescan AUR package (unofficial) [2] breaks several times a week because of sha256sum check miss-match since the Vuescan developer pushes many silent updates. Also the developer behind Vuescan is against other downloading options [3]. [1] https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF. [2] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/vuescan-bin https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/vuescan-bin [3] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2021-May/036313.html https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2021-May/0...

GekkePrutser 5y ago
Tesseract is the best free OCR by far though.. That's a big standard to compare to.

t0bia_s 5y ago

It is perfect software for Epson v850 Pro. I'm using it for digitalisation of my father's photo archive full of negatives and diapositives (around 30000 pictures). With Negative Lab Pro possibilities for solid digitalisation from analogue at home are unlimited.

qwerty456127 5y ago

This is an extremely awesome app. The fact it is a native (no-electron) multi-platform app is especially great.

paxys 5y ago
Vuescan was released 15 years before electron..

iforgotpassword 5y ago

I tried it for a magazine scanner, powerslide X or something a year ago. I couldn't get the exposure right. With single exposure, you got strong halo effects on rather dark images that had small, bright spots (reflections on small objects, eyes). So I tried multi-exposure which is also recommended with the official software for the scanner. But it seemed to mis-calculate something here. According to the scanner's manual, in this mode, the scanner takes three samples at different exposure times. I don't know what vuescan did wrong here, but on brighter images the scanner made "weird noises" and I got weird stripes in the final image. Darker photos worked just fine. The irony here is that despite vuescan being really customizable, totally overwhelming the first time you switch to advanced mode, there didn't seem to be a way to manually adjust the three individual exposure times, which I would totally have expected. Just a single slider. I was suspecting it would help to mitigate the issue in some way. That said, while this was mostly an issue with that specific scanner (no idea if they even have all the scanners at hand to test them, seems rather unlikely that they have a warehouse full of 6500 scanners ready to scan), in general the software was awesome. My plan was scanning about 10k slides and have it save the original scan without any further processing as a 16bpc tif, then autocrop, color correct and save as jpeg. Easily done with vuescan. Where I couldn't figure out things on my own, documentation helped out. Compare that to "Silverfast AI". Just to get a download of the trial version they wanted an email address. Strike one. Then the UI, it was just oversimplified and make to look cool, using its own theming entirely. To add insult to injury, it seems this was a rather recent overhaul, and many of the howtos on the web referred to a completely different gui layout. Strike two. And even after fiddling with the gui for a while, I failed to get a baseline setup that would just scan the image, use infrared dust removal, autocrop and nothing else. For some reason, there was always still some color boosting and sharpening going on, driving me crazy. Strike three. It also crashed twice, which is probably due to shitty drivers - the software that came with the device crashed too.[1] Uninstalled after this experience. But obviously, to get another strike, they kept spamming me with "hey wanna buy our crap" until I just deleted the mail alias I used for them. [1] Another bonus point for vuescan - it spawns a separate process for communicating with the scanner, completely eliminating that source for crashes.

invoke 5y ago

I've been using this for 10 years. It's a fantastic piece of software and allows me to continue to use a Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV without any issues! My APS films are still scannable! Woop woop!

deleted 5y ago

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dawidloubser 5y ago

I have been focusing on film-based photography for 15+ years - mostly printing in the darkroom, but also often scanning - and can wholeheartedly recommend Vuescan on Linux. About 6 years ago, however, I switched exclusively to the open-source XSane [1] and it operates my old scanner(s) beautifully, with all features including the transparency unit. Try it out if you don't have a highly unusual scanner with driver issues. My workflow involves: 1. XSane for scanning (to 16bit TIFF) 2. exiftool [2] to tag my images with full metadata from my notes: camera, lens, aperture, film, datetime etc just like your digital camera would 3. Darktable [3] to manage my library, cropping, sharpening, adjustments, and tagging It's a little bit of work - but nowhere near as much as taking and processing 4x5in photographs, and the "digital end results" are very satisfactory. If I may, an example image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dawidloubser/35944112383 https://www.flickr.com/photos/dawidloubser/35944112383 [1] http://www.sane-project.org/ http://www.sane-project.org/ [2] https://exiftool.org/ https://exiftool.org/ [3] https://www.darktable.org/ https://www.darktable.org/

mobilio 5y ago
I'm also using Sane for scanning on macOS. Because ScanJet doesn't have support.
_aavaa_ 5y ago
I also used to do flatbed scanning, and at one point even bought a scanner build to scan film. Recently though I switched to just using my digital camera and a macro lens to scan the film, and the difference is unbelievable. I found the digital camera better than the scanner in terms of just about everything.
- EricE 5y ago
  Do you have a jig to hold the phone/lens? Will have to look into this!
  - _aavaa_ 5y ago
    Yes. I ended up making one with parts and 3D printing. But there are plenty to buy. Mine is build as follows: 1. I’m using threaded hoods to attach to my lens and create a cylinder extending out. 2. I have a second piece which slides over the end of the tube with a bit of movement closer/further from the sensor to fiddle with focus and magnification. 3. The piece that fits over the tube has a piece to hold the film and show only one exposure at a time. Behind the film is a diffuser and a light source.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

This has been around for a very long time. I made my living, writing the corporate-sponsored software for some of the scanners VueScan supports. I was often goaded by “VueScan does this, so we need to do it, as well.” Hamrick is an awesome engineer, and it’s kind of heartwarming to see that he’s still going, like a big pink rabbit, banging a drum.

MarinaAlapont 5y ago

elcapitan 5y ago

This looks promising for my old Canon scanner.. I couldn't find out what the "advanced features" of the Professional version are, did someone see a feature comparison chart?

MrDresden 5y ago

Not directly related, but this reminded me of some reverse engineering work I did some years ago at a laboratory that was using a 17 year old, but still fully functioning, medical eye scanner whose companion software was so old that it had become increasingly difficult to run it. The software was released in 1999 with only one minor update in 2001. Even the manufacturer had lost all instances of the software, and once we contacted them to ask for guidence, they were not able to give any and in fact ended asking us to send them the software so that they would have a copy of it. And so we decided to completely reverse engineer the serial data connection and recreate the analysis display. It did take around 3 months of work, with lots of testing, but we did it. Since then I often wonder how many medical devices are thrown out simply due to issues with the companion software, and how nice it would be if there was an initiative like this for writing FOSS drivers/software to interact with them.

adolph 5y ago
> how many medical devices are thrown out simply due to issues with the companion software If in the US, did y'all get FDA certification for the internally developed software? Did the vendor? https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/device-advice-comprehensive-regulatory-assistance/guidance-documents-medical-devices-and-radiation-emitting-products https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/device-advice-comprehens...
- MrDresden 5y ago
  Not in the US, nor did the software relay anything back to the 'patient' in any way. They came in and gave permission for phenotype measurements for genetic studies.

sackerhews 5y ago

Nice project. After I had to throw away a perfectly fine and good scanner because it didn't have Windows 7 drivers (let alone Linux), I now only buy hardware that's properly supported on Linux.

vr46 5y ago

Ed Hamrick has been saving my arse since 2001, and my full licence from then is still honoured to this day. For real. Currently powering a Minolta Dimage 5400 II from the early 2000s and I really ought to find a way of giving the guy more money. Excellent software, ridiculously powerful, has kept my digital darkroom running for 21 years and counting.

oger 5y ago

Great piece of software - even if the user interface can be overwhelming and some features take time to figure out. But as a matter of fact I am able to continue using my old and trusty scanners even if software support by their vendors has stopped for many years. It was money well spent.

mattkevan 5y ago

Wow, that brings back some nostalgia. Very happy to hear they’re still going strong. Back in the early days of macOS, scanner manufacturers wouldn’t release compatible drivers for existing hardware, forcing you to buy a new one instead. Throwing away perfectly good hardware was a non-starter, so for a few years VueScan was the only way to use your scanner without having to boot into Classic. This became less of an issue with Image Capture and manufacturers realising that macOS wasn’t going to go away quietly, but VueScan saved the day for many a print designer at the time.

blunte 5y ago

I've also been using this for several years. It may have an old look in the UI, but it works very well and is reliable. Honestly, what more could you ask?

landswipe 5y ago

The only reason I keep a MacBook Pro lying around is this software and an old flatbed scanner :)

disruptiveink 5y ago

My feedback as a first time user is that it took me about four relaunches to figure out how to get to any kind of preferences, I couldn't figure out how to do anything beforehand. At least on macOS, VueScan > Preferences... does nothing when you're in "Basic" mode, it only switches you to the "Prefs" tab when you go to the "Input" and switch "Options" to "Standard" or "Professional". The app helpfully pops up a browser window at application close if it wasn't able to find a scanner, but it mentions nothing about how to do a manual set up. Would never in a million years think of looking in the "Input" tab to be able to see more preferences, I found it by sheer luck!

FreezingKeeper 5y ago

Another long-term Vuescan user here. From memory it was the Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X transition and lack of vendor support for the new OS that caused me to seek it out. The only thing I would love for them to add would be a way for the app to self-update.

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dada78641 5y ago

I like VueScan just fine, but as far as I can tell you can't do this: https://i.imgur.com/mjt6ruf.png https://i.imgur.com/mjt6ruf.png - of course, correct me if I'm wrong. Being able to freely rotate the section you're scanning is an absolute killer feature if you're scanning things that you can't easily line up perfectly, like anything smaller than A4. Most of my scanning is for archival purposes, and I need them to be as high quality as possible, and I definitely couldn't do without this feature.

radarsat1 5y ago

Nothing to do with VueScan, but I just went through a journey trying to find a good solution for an old HP laserjet/scanner combo that I picked up used for $40. Although it's not wifi enabled, and has no Mac support (that I need for a couple of laptops in my household), I got it running perfectly on a Raspberry Pi, despite some difficulties with the HP driver "ecosystem". (Why do they make it so complicated..) Once I got it working, I set up `saned` and was able to scan from my Ubuntu laptop over wifi just fine using `gscan2pdf`, which has a horrible user interface but at least gets the job done. Honestly it was a bit surprising to me to discover how terrible the scanning landscape still is in open source software, but I guess it's just not one of those things that is needed that often so some basic projects that were thrown together a decade ago still kind of work and that's that. I can accept that. However, despite printing working fine for all machines, I absolutely could not manage to get any kind of "bridge" working for scanning from the Mac laptop, which apparently uses a different scanner API called TWAIN, and no amount of messing around with TWAIN/sane bridges worked out. Not to mention that one of the two Macs was a "work" laptop for which it was not allowed to install drivers or system software. The whole time I was thinking, man, all I want is some web interface where I can log into the RPi and drive the scanner, and download the result, why is that so difficult. Lo and behold I came across this amazing project that solved the whole problem for me: https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs. I'm not affiliated with it, but I was just so impressed at how well it worked that I feel the need to mention it, and give kudos to the author. It was even easy to get running, just a single docker command on the RPi and it was up and running. The laptops can connect easily, of course, because it's just a local web server, and you can do multipage scans to PDF, which is really all I wanted. Fantastic bit of OSS, highly recommended if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation. Forget remote protocols and installing drivers, etc., just run this on the Pi and you're in business.

johnnyballgame 5y ago

I first started using VueScan around 2000 with a Nikon LS-30 film scanner and hundreds of crappy APS cartridges. I've never had to pay a dime for updates ever since. And they are put out regularly to this day. Hats off to Ed Hamrick for a handy piece of software that just does what it's supposed to do.

Skiiing 5y ago

Thank you Vuescan for saving years of my life. I have a huge 35mm collection that I needed to scan and had acquired a Nikon Coolscan 5. Not only was the Nikon software unsupported on modern OSes, it had severely limited capabilities in terms of RAW and batch scanning. With Vuescan I was able to setup a workflow where I pop in a filmstrip, and it scanned them all with no user intervention and saved as both RAW and TIFF. Then when it ejected the filmstrip 15 minutes later I just fed in a new one. So I could have a normal work day alongside the task. Just superb software.

EricE 5y ago

Aww, no support for my old Thunerscan! On a more serious note, as bad as it was, it was an amazing value for the time. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Thunderscan.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Thunderscan.txt

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unD 5y ago

Never understood the reason why Hasselblad (formerly Imacon) scanners aren't part of the list. Given the street price of several thousands of dollars and the fact that Hasselblad has decided to discontinue them a few years ago, there would be a large audience of users willing to pay good money for it.

causi 5y ago

I'm not sure I understand the value proposition. Supporting abandoned scanners is great, but $40 for essentially a driver seems rather steep. That's half the cost of a brand new scanner that will work with whatever software I want.

UberFly 5y ago

Vuescan is my go-to scanning software even if the scanner is new. The author seems like a good dude too. Great deal if you scan a lot.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Nice, though it would be better if manufacturers would open source the drivers and not do planned obsolescence in the first place. And most drivers and manufacturer-provided scanning software are total and utter crap, which is something that open source drivers could really help with too.