Epson Perfection V700 + FC11: sane vs. iscan?
 

Hello,

I'm about to buy a scanner - Epson perfection V700 and
I'm running FC11 on AMD Phenom X4 and the major use
will be scanning of color photos and negatives.

Looking at the list of supported scanners on SANE I saw
this scanner is listed there with the status "good".
I also saw at the Epson site in the "drivers download"
section that there is "iscan" for this scanner under FC11+x86_64.

I would like to know from people with previous experience
with this scanner under Fedora, how was it?

Should I choose to install either "sane-epson2" backend or the
"iscan" or these two can coexist?

What apps use what driver and how well they utilize the
hardware features of the scanner? I would very much like
the ability to scan negatives, does "good" status of "sane"
backend includes scanning negatives?

Are there any "traps" I should avoid in the process of
installation of each of the two drivers?

TIA for any info,
kaza.

All Epson scanners these days are supported at a basic level by the free sane drivers. They work great, but you're limited to a narrow choice of resolutions.

The avasys (formerly epkowa) driver will give you the whole range, but you have to use their iscan program to get full access--and it's a pretty lousy program, if I must say so (unless they've improved it in recent releases; I haven't updated it in some time). I have found that kooka does give me some extra resolution choices when I use the epkowa driver with it, however. Compiling it can be an adventure too.

The two drivers should be able to co-exist on your system. You just configure separate config files in /etc/sane.d for each one. Most front-ends will detect them both and give you a choice of which one to use. iscan only works with their proprietary one, of course.

I've only run a couple of film scan tests on mine (PM-A900==RX-700), so I can't say much about it. It worked well enough when using iscan, but the quality was rather low and fuzzy. Most of the blame may be due to my crappy negatives though. ;) Don't expect to be able to do a lot of quick batch-processing using iscan. You have to select, scan, adjust & save everything manually. When using kooka, funnily enough I can't access the avasys driver negative scanner through epkowa, but I can through the epson2 driver. On the other hand, it only scans the negative as a negative, it won't invert the colors.

If you really want to get the most out of your scanner though, you might consider purchasing the vuescan program, which gives you many more advanced features and functions. Follow the link in my signature below.

Thanks, David,

Yesterday I installed the "sane" drivers and tested the scanner with them and "xsane" (0.997).
Ordinary scan works, although the scanner is detected as slightly different model
and the top resolution is 3200dpi while the optical resolution of that scanner is 4800dpi.
But that's at least "in the neighbourhood" so I can deal with it (anyway, at this
resolutions I saw that the 15x10 cm printed photo resolution is much lower than the
scanner resolution). There was an option in "xsane" to select btween ordinary scan and
negatives scan.I replaced the print scans mat with a negatives adapter and tested scanning
a negative. The scanner worked and this time, at 3200dpi I didn't see any "smearing"
of the tiny objects (claw tip of 4cm shrimp shot with a macro lens). The colors where
slightly different on a scan of the negative compared with a print scan - as if a red needs
to be slightly more prominent. I attempted playing with various slides (gamma, brightness,
contrast), saw some changes but not yet what I want. In the "medium" selection there were
"Kodak film" and "standard negative" options but it even made the things worse - almost black
result so I went back to "full color range". Then I clicked the "RGB default" button
and the 3 slides of "gamma", "intensity", "contrast" turned into 12 slides: each slide
became 4 slides: one "general" and 3 for each of the red, green, blue components.
I guess I can find the correct point in this 12 dimentional space but I'll leave it
to when I'll have more time. BTW, in the "settings" I had the "enable color management"
disabled. An attempt o enable it, resulted in lots of errors of "could not open
scanner ICM profile". From some "googling" I understand that there should be some file
specific to the scanner with its color translation parameters. How can I obtain this file?

So far: scanning with xsane: good for prints, needs to find the correct setup for negatives scans.
When I'll have some time, I'll try installing "iscan" and then see if I need to buy the "vuescan".

Thanks for the info,
kaza.