I am running Linux Mint, and Mac OS. I see a major difference in quality between the Mac OS and the Linux scanning software available in the repository.

What causes this difference between the operating systems using the same scanner? I am using a Samsung Express M2070W. Using Linux the letters are grainy and somewhat unreadable, switching the usb to the mac they come out crystal clear.

I have the dpi set at 1200 on the Linux (max) using the gscan2pdf program and 600 on the mac.

Is there a fix for this on Linux?

Appreciate any feedback as I am new to the Linux OS.

Dennis

I don't know gscan2pdf, or MacOS, but I would suspect there may be a reduction of DPI in the linux pdf conversion process. If you want a high res image, you don't generally wrap it in a pdf. If you scan to an ultra massive tif, and the quality is still crap, then we have a scanning issue. Otherwise, it may be a pdf issue.

The quality of the scanning software is the answer, i.e., how well is your scanner supported by the available Linux software.
HP provides excellent Linux support for their printers and all-in-one office products (combination scanner, copier, fax and printer), but, for whatever reason, they do not provide Linux support for their standalone flatbed scanners.
As I've mentioned before, I've spent so much time trying to get good, quality scans using XSane, it would add up to hours, if not days, and, perhaps, even weeks.
I finally gave up and started running winXp in VirtualBox and therein, the HP windows driver for the scanner. Perfect results.
However, things just took a turn for the worst. Last weekend I bought a new motherboard, CPU and RAM. It took a few days to figure out why Xp running in VirtualBox could no longer access the USB ports. Turns out the motherboard uses the Intel xHCI driver to control all the USB ports and the xHCI driver is not supported by windows Xp or Vista.
So, now what?
I guess I could buy a copy of win7 or it might be cheaper to buy a new case and put the old motherboard in the old case and use it just for scanning....
We will see.....
To the OP, apologies for the digression.

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I'll add my voice to cwizardone's in stating that I chose to work around the scanning-on-linux issue the same way: Windows on Virtualbox. Linux support amongst scanner manufacturers seems to unfortunately still be a sore point and has been for years. Perhaps it will improve, but it reminds me a bit of linux support for firewire audio devices, and that stayed mediocre until firewire technology became basically obsolete.

Cheers.

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thanks for the responses kind of thought it had something to do with the software

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The other OSes do a lot to pretty up the results. So what you see isn't what was actually returned by the hardware. There could be finer controls that you're not using in linux. Various codecs and color modes in addition to resolution. With webcam things MJPG seems less grainy than the default YUYV or whatever non-MJPG mode it supports is. Most defaults tend to favor speed over quality IME. You really need to dive deeper a lot of times to get the results you want. Or just open the results in gimp, select all, gaussian blur, copy, revert to file, paste and opacity to 50%, then flatten image, and export.