Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: $67.00 | Rating: 4
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Kernel (uname -r):
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gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.9r6
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Distribution:
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gentoo
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If you look at the SANE-PROJECT pages, you will see this listed as Compatible. It is a clone of a Mustek Bearpaw that works.
If you then look up the Mustek Bearpaw you will see two different product IDs, one which works, one which does not.
I'm afraid to say that the PB1200+ currently on sale in UK at PC World is the one that does not.
That is not to say is does not work at all. The install involves extracting a file from your Windows driver disk or downloading it from the net. Details at SANE-PROJECT.
What I found was that lower resolution scans came out double-width, with the right half cut off. This affected Prescan as well. In addition the whole scan came out shifted a half-inch to the right. Fortunately the scanning area is 1/2in wider than A4.
The quality of the scans I got was poor. Colours were "all or nothing" with little shading. Whites tended to bleed into neighbouring areas making detail and text scanning absolutely useless.
It was just about OK to scan cartoons even then you could not get the colours right.
The unit was not faulty as it scanned well in Windoze. (Actually that's not true as there was a slightly patchy area at the top left of the page. I used that to take it back to the shop, upgrading another £10 to get a Canon LiDE20 for £45 which I could have got for £32 on the net!!!!).
Apparently the driver is being worked on at SANE but is not expected to be perfected just yet...
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