I'd seen occasional notices on the web about VueScan from Hamrick Software, but never paid it much attention as it was always described as an application for "film scanners". Still, I put it on the list of things I'd like to take a look at just to see if it might work ... of course, that list is quite long and there's always interesting stuff coming out that gets added, so it takes a while to get to everything :-).
This morning I finally got around to downloading and running VueScan for OS X ... and I now have a very functional UMAX SCSI scanner in OS X! VueScan is actually an incredibly capable general purpose scanning program which supports tons of scanners over a number of interfaces - SCSI, FireWire, and USB. There's a complete list (along with a short list of unsupported scanners) on the VueScan web site.
VueScan is a $40 shareware application which can be fully tested without registering - but all scans get a grey cross-hatch until you registor. So now I'm into research and decision mode between keeping my old SCSI scanner running or investing a bit more money in a newer, smaller, higher resolution FireWire model with OS X support (any thoughts on Agfa, HP?). But at least now I have a choice; until this morning, I thought new hardware was my only alternative.
If you've got an unsupported scanner, give VueScan's web page a quick look to see if they support your model.

