Greetings,

Buying a new scanner with excellent SANE support seems difficult. All the scanners available in my "local" webshops appear to be "too recent" to have SANE support, and none of the scanners by HP or Canon available in the SANE library are still available on the webshops.

Is this a common problem - that SANE is 9-12 months behind the development and thus has problems with new kit, or am I extremely unlucky in my choice of nearby webshops and their offering?

Does anyone have a fairly recent flatbed USB scanner to recommend that works well with Linux and is only a small flatbed document scanner, and not a fax, copier and coffee-maker multi-thing?

Thanks for any insight!

-Y1

Epson provides Linux drivers for its products through its Avasys subsidiary. But these are not exactly "Free", since they use binary modules, if that's important to you.

Otherwise, yes, it's going to take time for drivers to be developed. The machines all have to be reverse engineered, which can take days, months, or never. And with increasingly complicated scanner interfaces coming out this can sometimes be almost impossible to do without vendor support. That's a main reason why there aren't many recent Canon drivers, for example. I had a Canon scanner that still isn't usable 3 1/2 years after I got it, because Canon doesn't seem interested in supporting Linux. I switched to an Epson all-in-one and now I can scan and print normally.

Thanks much! Will check availability of these scanners and try to get one. If not, a freind of mine recommended a Canon LiDE-60 which is supported by SANE that I might also check out..

Thanks again for your reply!

-Y1