Scanning without supported device drivers

Oct 14, '01 09:41:50AM

Contributed by: robg

I have a quite old UMAX Astra 600S (SCSI) scanner that I haven't even tried to use in OS X in over a year, as UMAX has not released an OS X driver for it -- and probably never will, given that it relies on SCSI and is very old. So I'd been rebooting into OS 9 whenever I wanted to scan something.

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.

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