A kernel that has been enhanced with USB and scanner support sees this scanner correctly, and SANE detects what it is and allows me to use programs such as `scanimage'.

However, a problem that I found -- and I don't know whether this is a problem with Linux support or whether I am doing something wrong -- is that the scans have worse colors than they would if the same document/photo is scanned in Windows.

Maybe the Windows software that comes with the scanner (which requires 300 MB of hard drive space, BTW!) does some special post-processing to get the images to look normal, but the image quality in Linux definitely looks inferior.

It maybe has something to do with the fact that SANE does not properly control the scanner. When I request a scan at a high resolution, the scanner goes forward some distance, then jumps back a fraction of that distance... then goes forward again, and jumps back again. On Windows, it smoothly goes only forward.

I got one of these, but it broke down in less than a year. Considering I still have a workhorse of a cheap UMAX 2100U which had the butt kicked out of it for years when I used windows, this was disappointing. And I lost the receipt so I paid a lot and got about half-a-dozen scans out of it.

The actual fault was that the scan was blurred down one side. Probably took a knock but when you consider how robust my cheap old UMAX is.

I opened it up in an attempt to see if something was off its perch, and the internal build looked flimsy, not what I would expect at a premium price. I put it back together and the next scan was almost OK, the blurred area was narrower, but a few scans later it was back to its worst.

Shame, the driver seemed good. Just to check I made scans in Windoze98 and they were just as bad.

Linux compatibility 10/10

Value as a scanner 0/10

Average 5/10.

Came right up with KOOKA/SANE no issues
Also worked with red Hat 9 kernel 2.4-30.9

After adding user to group scanner, works perfectly.
I have the line
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs defaults,devmode=0666 0 0
in /etc/fstab, but can't remember if this is necessary.

The scanner did not work at all with Windows 98, as the software that came with it crashed when you tried to scan something. Typical!

The gamma settings in xsane tend to be a bit low, I find, so I set these manually.