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DoESLiverpool / somebody-should

A place to document practices on the wiki and collect issues/suggestions/to-do items for the physical space at DoES Liverpool
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Software for new (old) scanner #1851

Open magman2112 opened 1 year ago

magman2112 commented 1 year ago

Jackie has had a new (old) Scanner donated to DoES - A Canon LIDE 50.

When trying to find drivers for this scanner, the lastest version appears to be for Windows Vista, which isn't really compatible with the computers currently in use in DoES.

I been using a piece of scanner software for many years that maintains compatability with many scanners, called VueScan. I tested the new canon scanner with my copy of the software and it worked first time.

This is paid for software though, with the standard version being £49.95. There is a professional version for £99.95, but I suspect this isn't really necessary for the typical uses that DoES might need. You can upgrade the license though if a need was identified. There is a free trial version, but this watermarks the scans so isn't really useful apart from verifying that it works with your scanner. The software is also compatible with Mac and Linux. The standard version can be installed on up to 4 computers, but for conmercial/business use, you should buy a license per PC. The license is OK to use for as long as needed and has updates for a year (a bit like Lightburn), for future years you can pay a subscription of £24.95 per year to carry on getting updates.

I would suggest buying a single standard version license then picking a computer to install it on, probably the computer by the Dye Sublimation printer.

JackiePease commented 1 year ago

Marcus has named this "Hercules".

It works with "xsane" which is already installed on my Ubuntu machine. It would be useful to know if there is anything similar for Windows 11. Hopefully we can dispose of the broken black printer now.

zarino commented 1 year ago

FWIW, I did some quick research and it looks like there’s no free solution to get a Canon LIDE 50 running on a modern Mac :-( So Mac users would either need to buy a copy of VueScan, or, assuming Hercules is connected to a DoES PC running Linux and xsane, scan via that DoES PC and then transfer the files to their Mac. Bit of a pain.

(For those interested in why the LiDE 50 won’t work on a modern Mac, it’s because the only Mac drivers that Canon ever wrote for the LiDE 50 were 32bit PowerPC drivers. Up until ~2011, you could run these drivers on an Intel Mac thanks to Rosetta, but Mac OS X 10.7 Lion dropped support for Rosetta and PowerPC apps. Since then we’ve had another architecture change, to ARM-based Apple Silicon. Rosetta 2 (on Apple Silicon Macs) only works with Intel apps, not PowerPC apps. And, the cherry on the cake, in 2019, macOS 10.15 Catalina dropped support for 32bit apps altogether, so you’re doubly screwed. It might theoretically be possible to run the drivers in some sort of emulated environment, but nobody in their right mind is going to bother with that just to scan some documents.)