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Go Back   LinuxQuestions.org > HCL > Scanners > Packard Bell
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Packard Bell Diamond 1200 Plus
Reviews Views Date of last review
1 5657 12-24-2004
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Recommended By Average Price Average Rating
100% of reviewers $67.00 4.0



Description: It's a cheap scanner of the kind you throw in with a PC just to get a sale. 1200x1200 dpi resolution is enough to see the shortcomings in photographic film. It works though. Very light and easily portable, I often slip it in my laptop bag and use it un the university library to save on photocopying bills.

The first thing i noticed when i made the linux swichover was it's a mustek bearpaw in disguise. Thus it's really easy to find linux support. The chunk of the driver you need to make it work under linux is even on the disk, so getting it running with sane under mandrake was dead easy. It was a bit of a problem getting it to work without being root under fedora, but that's down to setting up permissions on the device. I shifted over to udev, set up a rule for it and bang, there it was happy and working.

The only real issue i've had with the scanner itself is the lid is really flimsy. I managed to leave my laptop power supply on it for maybe half an hour and It twisted out of shape really badly. But the simple application of a big referance manual and i was able to sort it out. I just have to remember not to lend Maximum Security to anyone if I want the lid to stay flat.....

Over all, it does exactly what it should. nothing more, nothing less. It's cheap and it works. A lot less could be said for some of the other scanners i've used. It looks pretty good too.
Keywords: Scanner USB Packard Bell
Chipset: Mustek Bearpaw
Connection Type: USB


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Old 12-24-2004, 07:12 AM   #1
davecs
 
Registered: Feb 2003
Distribution: PCLinuxOS
Posts: 481
Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: $67.00 | Rating: 4

Kernel (uname -r): gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.9r6
Distribution: 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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