I have an old Epson 2450 Perfection scanner that did a decent job of scanning 35mm color slides. On Windows. But I don't have a Windows box anymore and don't want one.

On Linux, with XSane and other such programs that scanner does a good job in flatbed mode but it fails to turn on the backlight when in "transparency" mode. So for transparencies it doesn't work at all.

I bought VueScan and that doesn't work in transparency mode either.

Wine dies trying to startup various twain dot exe drivers from Epson.

I'm ok with that. It's a 15 year old scanner. I'm happy to buy a new one but I want a scanner that will do 35mm slides, from Mint Cinnamon Linux. Actually I don't care about linux distribution.

I just want a scanner that works, and I don't have a Windoze box anymore.

Any suggestions?

Did you ever download the Linux driver package from Epson?

http://download.ebz.epson.net/dsc/se...search/?OSC=LX

The Perfection 2450 model is supported by the iscan packages, and includes the epkowa SANE driver. (Just in case that provides the required support for transparencies.)

uname -a
4.4.0-64-generic #85-Ubuntu SMP Mon Feb 20 11:50:30 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux


downloaded iscan-bundle-1.0.4.x64.deb.tar.gz

tar -xvzf iscan-bundle-1.0.4.x64.deb.tar.gz

cd iscan-bundle-1.0.4.x64.deb

sudo ./install.sh

..................
Processing was halted because there were too many errors.
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Ok. It's unfortunate that VueScan didn't work either. FWIW, I found an Ubuntu thread where various options were discussed for scanning negatives (in particular post #8). Good luck with finding something that works for you.

I found this regarding the transparency scanner for the 2450:

I gave up trying to find a scanner that works natively with linux that does transparencies. What I did is set up a Windows 10 headless Virtualbox VM on my Arch server, and I use my MicroTek i900 scanner for the job. I've scanned over 900 slides and the solution works very well.

Cheers !

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I have plenty of old boxes. Might have to buy some memory in order to beef up an and old XP box. And put a new Windoze10 on it. I need to be able to scan slides. It's part of my work now.

The solution I use, almost daily, is the HP scanner drivers running in XP-sp3, which in turn is running in VirtualBox on my Slackware64 Linux desktop. Works perfectly

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I have the Canon FS2720U film scanner. It works in Linux with VueScan. You find them occasionally on eBay.

HP provides without question the best support for Linux.

Do you mean your Canon scanner works in Transparencey mode? With Linux? They all seem to work in Flatbead Mode.

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Overall, I agree, they do provide Linux support for their printers and their "all-in-one" office products (print-fax-copy-scan), but for whatever reason they do not provide Linux support for their stand-alone flatbed scanners.

A left-field option might be to consider one of the numerous smart-phone based film scanner attachments on offer. I even found a DIY-Smartphone-Film-Scanner/ that looked reasonably easy to construct. Most smart-phones can connect ok to a Linux machine for easy transfer of the images. Just a thought anyway.

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The 2720U is 35mm film/slide only; no flatbed.

I'm leaning toward the film/transparency only Canon FS2720U film scanner
Thank you Awesomemachine for that tip.

I have a scanner that works with linux in flatbed mode. Transparency mode for dual mode scanners seems to be elusive.

I need to scan slides. I'll by the Canon FS2720U film scanner