I've been using VueScan for years and it's great. Not sure why so many naysayers. My main use case for VueScan is scanning lots of pages in a document while performing necessary cropping and rotation and color correction on each page, and possibly saving the end result in a multi-page PDF.
The builtin scanner in macOS allows either previewing, or scanning into a file, but it can't save the preview into a file. Previwing is crucial in order to determine what to crop or rotate, but scanning another time after the preview wastes a lot of time.
The builtin scanner can rotate, but it can't preview the rotation. It has limited color correction capability (which is important for making black & white documents... more black & white, and well-readable). It can't save to multi page PDF. It can't tweak JPEG quality. It can't preview in color but save in black & white.
And OCR. Damn, so nice. It can generate PDFs with selectable and searchable text!
VueScan can do all of that. Strongly recommended if you need to scan more than a few pages on a regular basis. Well worth the price tag.
The only downside is that its UI is a bit complicated, with lots of settings. It should be regarded a power user tool.
When I buy furniture or another appliance, I throw away the paper manual and store the digitally scanned version. It's hard to find paper documents: there are too many. In comparison, finding digital documents is trivial.
> The only downside is that its UI is a bit complicated, with lots of settings. It should be regarded a power user tool.
That's not a downside for me. I always found bundled scanner software to be an oversimplified nightmare, though admittedly I haven't seen any for 20 years thanks to VueScan.
I used to use vueprint as my go-to image viewer on windows.
VueScan is pretty good. No drivers, OCR works well. The UI is clunky and kind of buggy sometimes, but scanning works really well (I did have problems with a specific scanner which became unstable. Could be the MFP itself though)
I purchased both VuePrint and VueScan shortly after they came out in 1998. At the time I found both to be invaluable tools, especially VueScan. I used flatbed scanners both at work and home at the time and the VueScan GUI was far superior to any other scanning software available at the time.
I purchased a copy when Windows 7 did not support my HP ScanJet 2100c. The 25-year-old scanner was built to a higher quality standard than current products, and is still working great.
Not directly related, but this reminded me of some reverse engineering work I did some years ago at a laboratory that was using a 17 year old, but still fully functioning, medical eye scanner whose companion software was so old that it had become increasingly difficult to run it.
The software was released in 1999 with only one minor update in 2001. Even the manufacturer had lost all instances of the software, and once we contacted them to ask for guidence, they were not able to give any and in fact ended asking us to send them the software so that they would have a copy of it.
And so we decided to completely reverse engineer the serial data connection and recreate the analysis display. It did take around 3 months of work, with lots of testing, but we did it.
Since then I often wonder how many medical devices are thrown out simply due to issues with the companion software, and how nice it would be if there was an initiative like this for writing FOSS drivers/software to interact with them.
Not in the US, nor did the software relay anything back to the 'patient' in any way. They came in and gave permission for phenotype measurements for genetic studies.
I have been focusing on film-based photography for 15+ years - mostly printing in the darkroom, but also often scanning - and can wholeheartedly recommend Vuescan on Linux.
About 6 years ago, however, I switched exclusively to the open-source XSane [1] and it operates my old scanner(s) beautifully, with all features including the transparency unit.
Try it out if you don't have a highly unusual scanner with driver issues. My workflow involves:
1. XSane for scanning (to 16bit TIFF)
2. exiftool [2] to tag my images with full metadata from my notes: camera, lens, aperture, film, datetime etc just like your digital camera would
3. Darktable [3] to manage my library, cropping, sharpening, adjustments, and tagging
It's a little bit of work - but nowhere near as much as taking and processing 4x5in photographs, and the "digital end results" are very satisfactory.
Hi there,
I've been working on scanning about 5000 (estimated) printed photos, using xsane and some flatbed scanners. My question for you is: how do you find scanning to 16bit?
Currently I'm scanning 8bit TIFF, 1200DPI, full colour.
When scanning 16bit TIFF, I found it completely wrecked the general ambiance, colour and lighting of the printed image. The resulting scan looks nothing like how it was printed.
The impression I get online is that 16bit TIFF should be the scan target for proper archival of the material, but I can't in good faith use this given the results look, I would say, worse than 8bit.
I have some examples here.
Image captured to TIFF at 1200dpi, with default flat settings for levels. The capture was compressed to 100% quality JPEG, and to 50% of original sizing.
Image captured to TIFF at 1200dpi, with colour, brightness, contrast levels set automatically by xsane based on "Acquire Preview". The capture was compressed to 100% quality JPEG, and to 50% of original sizing.
Did you calibrate the scanner and embed the ICC profile into the TIFF (or at least use the manufacturer-provided color profiles assuming they’re not already bundled w/ SANE)? You can do that <del>quite easily</del> easily enough to be worth it with Argyll CMS and it makes a huge difference to color accuracy.
Hi there, the scanners are calibrated through xsane. However, I don't have any ICC profile provided either by Canon, or from xsane. I'll have to check the provided firmware or software packages from Canon, to extract any ICC Profiles.
So far though, the quality given by only doing 8-bit has been more than acceptable for myself and my family; everyone in the family has been fairly excited and glad with the results.
With any future projects where I strongly feel the need for accurate archival, I'll definitely be using better hardware, and I can only hope whoever is paying me to do that would provide me with a nice piece of color calibration hardware.
xsane doesn't do any actual color calibration, just some heuristics for color correction. There's also no fancy hardware involved for scanner calibration (that's required for calibrating printers, though) - all you need is to purchase a "known good" color chart printout off of the web (or eBay) and scan it then process the resulting TIFF w/ Argyll to generate an ICC (assuming its one of the charts that Argyll has the "correct" color values for, otherwise you'll need to buy a chart that comes with a "correct" model on a CD/USB alongside it or else use a "good enough" color values chart that someone uploaded).
Yes. I ended up making one with parts and 3D printing. But there are plenty to buy.
Mine is build as follows:
1. I’m using threaded hoods to attach to my lens and create a cylinder extending out.
2. I have a second piece which slides over the end of the tube with a bit of movement closer/further from the sensor to fiddle with focus and magnification.
3. The piece that fits over the tube has a piece to hold the film and show only one exposure at a time. Behind the film is a diffuser and a light source.
Same here, it's like GraphicConverter, no brainer buying a licence now and then. In the case of VueScan, I wouldn't really need it as I don't use it often, but it counts as 'asset' instead of feeling like i'm a cow to be milked.
My father texted me the other day with the question of how to get his old Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400 running again. I suggested trying Vuescan - IIRC it used to be possible to use Vuescan drivers with the original software too.
A few hours later he replied "hmm, well, I prefer the original software and I can't get that running, but according to the box [of the scanner] it should work with Windows XP."
So in the end my dad managed to find an old XP computer from 2005 somewhere in his attic, set it up (without internet of course) just to scan his old negatives and slides, then does all the actual editing work on his new laptop. It works but the old computer is clearly the bottleneck.
I think the next time I visit him I'll try to get the software running with Vuescan instead, it probably would be faster (the scanning software always uses 100% of the CPU while scanning, so that might actually be more of a bottleneck than the USB2.0 connection). Plus I wouldn't mind supporting the developers behind it.
(also, re:"get a new scanner", I'm not sure how slide scanners these days would compare to that 5400. Sometimes technology peaks and then gets worse, especially on the consumer end as the market shrinks, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is true for film scanning tech)
> (also, re:"get a new scanner", I'm not sure how slide scanners these days would compare to that 5400. Sometimes technology peaks and then gets worse, especially on the consumer end as the market shrinks, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is true for film scanning tech)
I have a 5400 as well. I think that maybe the current Plustek scanners are its equal in most ways (and are hopefully quieter!) but you're right. Even the 5400 II is not really an improvement over the 5400.
Side note about the 5400: if it should totally die, there's a market on eBay for whole machines for parts, but you'll notice that most of them do not include the lens.
The reason is that the lens a) fully covers full frame and b) is ridiculously sharp and a favourite with macro photographers:
The 5400 is a really great scanner. Vuescan is a bit odd to get used to but it opens so much control and the possibility to scan color negatives using the “advanced workflow” where you lock the orange mask film base compensation values across a roll (or a batch of rolls). I much prefer to use Vuescan over the original software which assesses every exposure on its own and doesn’t let you control very much.
Vuescan also supports creating and using custom input profiles if you have an IT8 target as either a slide or a reflective object that you photograph (documentation claims that this won’t work but I found it to be an improvement - essentially profiling the combo of the unique characteristics of the sensor and a certain film type and some variability from lab conditions)
The hardware on the 5400 is about as good as it gets for scanning 35mm unless you get into Imacon territory. Doing comparisons between the 5400 and an Imacon 848, I’ve never been very convinced the 5400 is missing out on much. The one weak spot with the 5400 in my opinion is the film holder’s inability to perfectly keep a curly negative flat at the ends of the strip, a problem that the Imacon gracefully and completely solves with its curved film path. On the 5400 back-rolling stubborn negatives before scanning at full resolution usually does the trick.
Vuescan will also let you save raw versions with an optional separate layer for the IR channel which can be used to handle motivation. I like the idea of capturing as much data as possible with the ability to process as you wish later.
Ed Hamrick has always been responsive and helpful if I have contacted him about something. A few years ago I realized I had been using Vuescan happily and consistently for 15 years for only a single payment of less than $100 and bought a second for the heck of it.
"get a new scanner" doesn't work when no currently manufactured scanners have the same features that some of the old ones did. In particular, anything involving film scanning seems to involve painful use of film holders when 35mm has sprockets for a reason. I suppose I should be happy I never bought into APS film :P
Very few scanners will use sprocket transport for 35mm, really just minilabs doing scanning before it's sliced I'd think. Also much of the film community leans towards medium format/large format (if you're going to the hassle of dealing with film, make it worth it in quality, basically) which don't have sprocket holes at all.
Virtually all film scanners past and present use a film holder to make the film easier for the scanner (and the human) to manipulate and to offload the problem of film flatness to a sub-assembly. That's completely normal imo.
You are correct though that the film scanner market is dead as a doornail, film isn't exactly a high-volume business (however, afaik it is slowly growing however - that market hit bottom in the early '10s and Kodak/Ilford sales are growing these days). The entire market consists of the Epson V600 at the low end, Epson V850 Pro at the high end, and then Hasselblad makes the Flextight line at the professional end ($12-15k). Then you've got various old/discontinued models with varying level of support. So VueScan is really doing a solid here keeping that hardware in service.
One of these days I need to upgrade my V500 (predecessor to the v600) to a V850 so I can do large format on a flatbed. Right now I am using a Polaroid SprintScan 45 Ultra (which is a SCSI scanner that is only supported on VueScan anymore). I would love a Flextight but it's not justifiable and the options for a modern CCD (which, in parlance, is basically the opposite of a flatbed) are nonexistent other than that.
Unfortunately doing anything other than 35mm brings a massive jump in price, so I think it's here to stay for a long time. I loved doing medium format/120, but it's absolutely cost prohibitive. Minilabs scanning before it's sliced? Oh hey that's me!
Basically film development has become so expensive that it's more economical for me to either develop (or have developed) the roll and then scan all the pictures to see what they are. Realistically, I have nobody to share prints with, so any photo I want to share has to be digitised anyways. The TIFFs /are/ the prints now.
Film holders make my life pain since alignment becomes a huge problem, however film carriers are good. They're usually some roller assembly that may or may not have a thru-path (in the case of my nikon it can take up to 6 frames before bottoming out). Sprockets are usually counted optically - I've never actually seen something that physically engaged with the sprockets. I've tried using a flatbed but the time spent aligning (during which dust has an opportunity to come to the party) and slowness of the scan means what used to be "1 hour photo" is now more like 3 hours. I explored pacific rim's primefilm options, but swore them off when I discovered 2 scans of the same image would have odd distortions. The stepper motor was vibrating the CCD!
I know a lot of people use Epson flatbeds at the low end for a hobby, but how can you deal with that massive time sink? I've been on the edge about trying to create one of those camera based scanners. I've seen plenty of small trapezoidal scanners that are definitely a smartphone camera pointed at a light box, and I'd actually be fine with this, but they almost always just output pre-baked jpegs to an sdcard for grandma. I've been toying with the idea of recreating one with a raspberry pi & their "pro" camera so that I can have controls over the scanning process. Literally any control at all would be nice.
I still miss my old sony scanner's ability to set a film colour correction profile by reading the barcode on the edge of the negative /and/ set the frame count and filename in a batch from that data.
I did, and that's why the Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV is a great scanner as it automatically winds through the APS films scanning each film. Vuescan was a life saver to be able to continue using my scanner!
I use Vuescan with my Dimage Scan Dual IV! It works a dream. Software is much better than the Konica Minolta software. Also, works in modern Windows and Mac OSes.
Many film scanners capture four channels of exposure data: RGB and infrared. Since developed film can block visible light but is more or less transparent to IR, that winds up being a pretty good map of where all the dust specks are. Which, in turn, allows automatic and very targeted software dust removal that can completely avoid parts of the exposure without dust, producing A quality of output more comparable to that of laborious retouching than inferior automatic software dust removal without a dust map.
IMO that alone is sufficient to justify a film scanner over a DSLR.
Yes, this does work well (and it gives you a bunch of options for rapidly extracting a lot of dynamic range out of a transparency.)
But you can maybe even use the lens from your scanner, if you can liberate it and mount it.
Film scanners typically have a thin strip that is often rather wider than a frame of film (because that was the way they achieved higher scan resolution at lower cost).
So what you have in your scanner is a tiny, sharp, fixed aperture lens with an image circle generally large enough for full frame.
I love Vuescan. The UI could use a bit of polishing, but the software works perfectly.
Just don't use the build in OCR function. For some reason it always made many errors compared to OCRmyPDF (Tesseract OCR) [1].
Sadly the Vuescan AUR package (unofficial) [2] breaks several times a week because of sha256sum check miss-match since the Vuescan developer pushes many silent updates.
Also the developer behind Vuescan is against other downloading options [3].
Every time I've tried it it's been an absolutely hellish experience. It abstracts too much of what the scanner driver is doing. I don't know what units it's doing things in. It snaps input numbers to the nearest number the scanner driver supports (if I enter "5" it'll change to "4.998" after a second), but again, I have no idea what it's actually measuring because everything's in scaled floats when it shouldn't be.
Auto exposure uh... happens, but I don't get to know what it's decided, nor can I set it manually. I can "lock" the auto exposure for all frames in a strip, or I can add or subtract from the auto-chosen value. Do I get to choose the value though? Nope.
If it runs out of ram it just deletes previews and makes you scan them again when you go scroll back to them (you can increase the ram limit in settings to mitigate this), losing your settings for that image.
All in all, I'm glad I can use my scanner at all, but it's too buggy and I wish they would let me pay for their huge amount of reverse engineering effort as a driver and write my own TWAIN software on top. From what I understand it's just a two-man team behind it and I think it's just too much to expect them to maintain the amount of complexity they've signed on for, so I can't be mad. However, it does sound a lot like that FSF/GPL origin story where RMS got mad he couldn't fix something in the printer software.
I first started using VueScan around 2000 with a Nikon LS-30 film scanner and hundreds of crappy APS cartridges. I've never had to pay a dime for updates ever since. And they are put out regularly to this day. Hats off to Ed Hamrick for a handy piece of software that just does what it's supposed to do.
Ed Hamrick has been saving my arse since 2001, and my full licence from then is still honoured to this day. For real. Currently powering a Minolta Dimage 5400 II from the early 2000s and I really ought to find a way of giving the guy more money. Excellent software, ridiculously powerful, has kept my digital darkroom running for 21 years and counting.
This has been around for a very long time. I made my living, writing the corporate-sponsored software for some of the scanners VueScan supports. I was often goaded by “VueScan does this, so we need to do it, as well.”
Hamrick is an awesome engineer, and it’s kind of heartwarming to see that he’s still going, like a big pink rabbit, banging a drum.
I have a huge 35mm collection that I needed to scan and had acquired a Nikon Coolscan 5. Not only was the Nikon software unsupported on modern OSes, it had severely limited capabilities in terms of RAW and batch scanning.
With Vuescan I was able to setup a workflow where I pop in a filmstrip, and it scanned them all with no user intervention and saved as both RAW and TIFF. Then when it ejected the filmstrip 15 minutes later I just fed in a new one. So I could have a normal work day alongside the task. Just superb software.
Nothing to do with VueScan, but I just went through a journey trying to find a good solution for an old HP laserjet/scanner combo that I picked up used for $40. Although it's not wifi enabled, and has no Mac support (that I need for a couple of laptops in my household), I got it running perfectly on a Raspberry Pi, despite some difficulties with the HP driver "ecosystem". (Why do they make it so complicated..)
Once I got it working, I set up `saned` and was able to scan from my Ubuntu laptop over wifi just fine using `gscan2pdf`, which has a horrible user interface but at least gets the job done. Honestly it was a bit surprising to me to discover how terrible the scanning landscape still is in open source software, but I guess it's just not one of those things that is needed that often so some basic projects that were thrown together a decade ago still kind of work and that's that. I can accept that.
However, despite printing working fine for all machines, I absolutely could not manage to get any kind of "bridge" working for scanning from the Mac laptop, which apparently uses a different scanner API called TWAIN, and no amount of messing around with TWAIN/sane bridges worked out. Not to mention that one of the two Macs was a "work" laptop for which it was not allowed to install drivers or system software.
The whole time I was thinking, man, all I want is some web interface where I can log into the RPi and drive the scanner, and download the result, why is that so difficult. Lo and behold I came across this amazing project that solved the whole problem for me: https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs. I'm not affiliated with it, but I was just so impressed at how well it worked that I feel the need to mention it, and give kudos to the author.
It was even easy to get running, just a single docker command on the RPi and it was up and running. The laptops can connect easily, of course, because it's just a local web server, and you can do multipage scans to PDF, which is really all I wanted. Fantastic bit of OSS, highly recommended if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation. Forget remote protocols and installing drivers, etc., just run this on the Pi and you're in business.
I tried it for a magazine scanner, powerslide X or something a year ago.
I couldn't get the exposure right. With single exposure, you got strong halo effects on rather dark images that had small, bright spots (reflections on small objects, eyes).
So I tried multi-exposure which is also recommended with the official software for the scanner. But it seemed to mis-calculate something here. According to the scanner's manual, in this mode, the scanner takes three samples at different exposure times. I don't know what vuescan did wrong here, but on brighter images the scanner made "weird noises" and I got weird stripes in the final image. Darker photos worked just fine.
The irony here is that despite vuescan being really customizable, totally overwhelming the first time you switch to advanced mode, there didn't seem to be a way to manually adjust the three individual exposure times, which I would totally have expected. Just a single slider. I was suspecting it would help to mitigate the issue in some way.
That said, while this was mostly an issue with that specific scanner (no idea if they even have all the scanners at hand to test them, seems rather unlikely that they have a warehouse full of 6500 scanners ready to scan), in general the software was awesome. My plan was scanning about 10k slides and have it save the original scan without any further processing as a 16bpc tif, then autocrop, color correct and save as jpeg. Easily done with vuescan. Where I couldn't figure out things on my own, documentation helped out.
Compare that to "Silverfast AI". Just to get a download of the trial version they wanted an email address. Strike one. Then the UI, it was just oversimplified and make to look cool, using its own theming entirely. To add insult to injury, it seems this was a rather recent overhaul, and many of the howtos on the web referred to a completely different gui layout. Strike two. And even after fiddling with the gui for a while, I failed to get a baseline setup that would just scan the image, use infrared dust removal, autocrop and nothing else. For some reason, there was always still some color boosting and sharpening going on, driving me crazy. Strike three. It also crashed twice, which is probably due to shitty drivers - the software that came with the device crashed too.[1] Uninstalled after this experience. But obviously, to get another strike, they kept spamming me with "hey wanna buy our crap" until I just deleted the mail alias I used for them.
[1] Another bonus point for vuescan - it spawns a separate process for communicating with the scanner, completely eliminating that source for crashes.
Vuescan recently saved me when I was trying to get my first scanner to work, simply by actually managing to scan. That way, I knew that at least the scanner wasn’t broken, and I simply needed to figure out what was wrong (turns out the Canon driver hates it when your Windows region does not match your language and number formats…). After getting the original software to run, I didn’t need Vuescan again, but I thought it was a cool tool.
Is vuescan not a safer choice? Epson, canon and hp software tend to do automatic updates and may choose to brick your device if you use the wrong ink. They also tend to collect data unless you carefully fight every setting. Why even expose yourself to that? I only biy oki and brother printers for this reason - fine tech without the evil.
My feedback as a first time user is that it took me about four relaunches to figure out how to get to any kind of preferences, I couldn't figure out how to do anything beforehand. At least on macOS, VueScan > Preferences... does nothing when you're in "Basic" mode, it only switches you to the "Prefs" tab when you go to the "Input" and switch "Options" to "Standard" or "Professional". The app helpfully pops up a browser window at application close if it wasn't able to find a scanner, but it mentions nothing about how to do a manual set up.
Would never in a million years think of looking in the "Input" tab to be able to see more preferences, I found it by sheer luck!
I like VueScan just fine, but as far as I can tell you can't do this: https://i.imgur.com/mjt6ruf.png - of course, correct me if I'm wrong.
Being able to freely rotate the section you're scanning is an absolute killer feature if you're scanning things that you can't easily line up perfectly, like anything smaller than A4. Most of my scanning is for archival purposes, and I need them to be as high quality as possible, and I definitely couldn't do without this feature.
Wow, that brings back some nostalgia. Very happy to hear they’re still going strong.
Back in the early days of macOS, scanner manufacturers wouldn’t release compatible drivers for existing hardware, forcing you to buy a new one instead.
Throwing away perfectly good hardware was a non-starter, so for a few years VueScan was the only way to use your scanner without having to boot into Classic.
This became less of an issue with Image Capture and manufacturers realising that macOS wasn’t going to go away quietly, but VueScan saved the day for many a print designer at the time.
Hi,
Just wanted to point out that the SANE project has complete support for the ScanSnap S1500.[1]
I can highly recommend using xsane [2] (the graphical front-end application from the SANE project) with your host OS, makes it all much more streamlined.
I am writing up documentation myself about using the S1300i on Linux, it's a great device.
I did look into using SANE (many years ago now) but I couldn’t find any equivalent to the Fujitsu software to do things like auto-rotate, auto-de-skew, control over multi-page PDF output, long page scanning, continuous scanning, … a ton of stuff that the ScanSnap Manager does to make it all smooth and easy.
I’d be interested in reading your writeup, particularly if something has changed in the last few years.
Hi, I finished part of the writeup, mainly as the Fujitsu was a gift, but I want to refine it a bit before posting.
For stuff like auto-rotate, auto-de-skew, multipage PDF output; those can all be handled by external programs, and realistically that's what I'd recommend.
convert (part of imagemagick) can handle rotate and page merging, as well as conversion to other formats.
For de-skew, and possibly other features you're looking for, ScanTailor [1] is probably a good option. Can't speak on it's functional quality though, I prefer to manually fix skew for photos.
Convert also has a deskew option [2], but I've not tested it, and a few online results [4] seem to point to it not working that well.
There's also OCRmyPDF [3] which I found excellent for OCRing scanned print documents.
---
Below are some notes on the other things you mentioned.
Sorry about the formatting, I couldn't find anything about markdown or HTML on HN. I just copied this from Zim
Long page scanning
* In the main xsane control window (upper left normally), select the Window tab, select Show standard options
* Keyboard shortcut: CTRL+5
* If the Standard Options window is already open, click the option again after it closes, to reopen it.
* In the Standard Options menu, set page height to 0.000.
* This allows the scanner to scan documents longer than standard A4 sizing. For example, you can scan legal sized or longer documents.
* The scanner with continue scanning the document until the paper exits the scanner physically.
---
Continuous scanning:
On the main xsane window, change the following settings:
* Where it says ADF Front or ADF Back, change to ADF Duplex if you are scanning duplex. Alternatively change to ADF Front or ADF Back if you know which side you want scanned.
* If you are scanning Duplex, change the number 1 to 2; next to the icon of 4 papers on top of each other
* This represents how many pages are scanned.
\* If you have multiple documents in the feeder (as the S1300i supports loading 20 documents at a time), you should set the number of pages to scan (same option) to either the number of pages, if scanning single sided, or DOUBLE the total number of pages, if scanning Duplex.
\* Alternatively, set it to a number higher than 40, and the scanner will continue scanning until there are no pages left.
Requires a cloud account though, doesn't it? The old non-connected 32-bit did not, so when MacOS dropped 32-bit support I switched to VueScan. "Cloud-enabled" is strictly a liability when scanning legal and financial documents.
Never understood the reason why Hasselblad (formerly Imacon) scanners aren't part of the list. Given the street price of several thousands of dollars and the fact that Hasselblad has decided to discontinue them a few years ago, there would be a large audience of users willing to pay good money for it.
Great piece of software - even if the user interface can be overwhelming and some features take time to figure out. But as a matter of fact I am able to continue using my old and trusty scanners even if software support by their vendors has stopped for many years. It was money well spent.
This was so good. I was sad to realize the iOS app was unmaintained (or at least not updated for a good while) a few years ago, and eventually got a new scanner that “just worked” with Preview on the Mac, but I do recommend VueScan overall. It’s a remarkable piece of software.
Nice, though it would be better if manufacturers would open source the drivers and not do planned obsolescence in the first place.
And most drivers and manufacturer-provided scanning software are total and utter crap, which is something that open source drivers could really help with too.
It is perfect software for Epson v850 Pro. I'm using it for digitalisation of my father's photo archive full of negatives and diapositives (around 30000 pictures). With Negative Lab Pro possibilities for solid digitalisation from analogue at home are unlimited.
Another long-term Vuescan user here. From memory it was the Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X transition and lack of vendor support for the new OS that caused me to seek it out. The only thing I would love for them to add would be a way for the app to self-update.
I'm not sure I understand the value proposition. Supporting abandoned scanners is great, but $40 for essentially a driver seems rather steep. That's half the cost of a brand new scanner that will work with whatever software I want.
Really thought it was a good idea until I saw the price tag. I would say for most home users go get a new and supported printer/scanner might actually a cheaper and better solution, though not that environment friendly.
And also install their spyware/crapware, deal with terrible performance, watch it fail every update, etc.
Vuscan is a gem for making computers just work the way people assume they should. I used to have deal with printer/scanner problems regularly for a particular family member; now I sometimes proactively ask to see if any issues have arisen - nope. It has just been working across two printers and a major OS upgrade.
Not necessarily true. I have one mono laser printer and one color MFP for almost 7 years now, both were dirt cheap and now both are still going strong, nothing to complain really.
My Brother printer becomes 20 years next year. It's still working as new, have changed drum once and the support page on Brother even says it supports windows 10 and yes it does, it just worked. No extra installation needed. My Brother MFP (scanner, printer) I found in a second hand store for 10 euro, also just works but is a bit newer.
Interesting. I had a Brother duplex wi-fi laser printer die on me last year. It was about 10 years old but had led a very sheltered life - only on its 2nd or 3rd toner.
Didn’t seem to be anything mechanically wrong with it, but one day it just stopped printing or receiving commands properly. Still booted up ok and menus were responsive, but would freeze up on any attempt to print, even a test page. Sad day, but I’ve learned to live without a printer now.
Nothing surprising IMO as it's about 10 years old. Since you did not use it much, I would say the mechanical structures would be still very sound but it's the electronics were the culprits. If you kept it turned on, current would have aged the components and if any of the critical ones failed, it's done. But it might have failed even sooner if you rarely turned it on as moisture accumulated in the components and when it should get to some threshold, it got busted as soon as it turned on.
We have used lots of Brother printers at work. All of them worked just fine except one that we exchanged before the 2 year warranty ran out. They are rated at a certain number of pages per drum and that has kept pretty well so far, after two drum changes the paper jams starts to get higher and after a while they will be pensioned. My much older one has outlived them all though. At work we don't use printers the same way any more so not much need for them thankfully.
A much cheaper and better solution is to use an opensource OS that use Sane.
I ditched it 2y ago when I changed country but I have been using an old usb scanner whose latest drivers were only installable on windows ME and 2000 for years on my different linux distros. If you don't want to use linux as your main OS, most virtualization solutions support USB forwarding and shared folders which allow one to scan on a vm and get the files directly on the host OS.
You were absolutely right about that. The catch is that for fair bits of ordinary users, they might even be struggling using Windows, and maintaining a VM under Linux would be a huge undertaking. Don't take me wrong, I'm not saying Linux is not good but rather than it's still fair bit of work to be done for ordinary users. I used Windows for almost two decades now, and I'm now at the verge to ditch Windows myself...
I don't think the task is hard but it requires patience as nothing is more complicated but you need to learn to do everything in a somewhat different way.
Despite being a sysadmin I have always been clear with my partners that I would never provide support for their windows computer. If they were willing to switch to linux they could and I would help them, otherwise they were on their own. I never tried forcing anyone. Might look extreme but after a day of work I didn't want to fight an OS/ecosystem I hated for its lack of transparency while I could rest or spend quality time.
When I was married to my first wife we had only one computer that I configured with dual boot so she sometimes used my linux to browse something when I had it open as she didn't care about rebooting and thus ended up curious. After some kind of frustration on windows she started learning a bit deeper how to do things on Linux (I was using slackware at the time!). The thing is she was unemployed at the time so had plenty of time to learn. She was also interested in illustration and we were simply too broke to buy the Adobe Suite so she started using sodipodi and then its fork inkscape that weren't initially ported on windows and gimp. Later on when we divorced she kept that computer as I had purchased a laptop. I have lost contact now but 5y later she told me she had been given a faster one from friends and had replaced the windows that came with it with an ubuntu.
My 2 subsequent long-time partners never did the switch. I believe the difference is not that they are more clueless about computer but with kids and/or a job it leaves little time to dedicate on learning something new despite all the frustration and swearing they get from their windows computer. Current partner is frustrated a lot as her windows 10 simply takes ages to boot and be usable so she sometimes borrow the laptop I dedicate to my daughters which runs on Fedora when she want to consult something quick. Main barrier I guess is the data she already has on the original computer which I patiently wait for it to die or she throw it through the window. I did an exception with my no support rule to set up some backups so she doesn't lose anything when it will happen
> If you don't want to use linux as your main OS, most virtualization solutions support USB forwarding and shared folders which allow one to scan on a vm and get the files directly on the host OS.
This sounds cheaper. It doesn't sound better.
VueScan is nerdy in places but it is simpler than this.
In the early days of Vuescan, you got unlimited updates for something like $40 and, as far as I can tell, those agreements are still being honoured. I suppose Hamrick could have said "Sorry, your license is for Vuescan, but now it’s vu-scan, that’s different", but he hasn’t.
Hamrick is an upstanding guy who deserves a lot of respect for the way he’s run his business for over 20 years now. He seems like a one man shop that just never sells out and goes on indefinitely. I guess the software will die when he does.
Startups are all the rage on HN but here is a great example of a lifestyle business that is long-lived and well-respected by many.
> Hamrick is an upstanding guy who deserves a lot of respect for the way he’s run his business for over 20 years now. He seems like a one man shop that just never sells out and goes on indefinitely. I guess the software will die when he does.
I'm a vuescan license holder since 2004. 18 years! I could have sworn I was using it 2 years earlier, though.
Good news: He has a "farmers continuity plan" - He gave birth to his successor. He now runs it with his son, who he raised as a developer :-)
Well said. Also in the Mac world—I can't speak to other platforms—I'd say your description of Hamrick the person and business also applies to Peter Lewis, the person behind Keyboard Maestro.
My license from 1999 is still valid. I originally purchased it for doing slide scanning on an LS-2000 and once I stopped shooting film I did not use vuescan until a few years ago when I needed to do a bunch of flatbed scans. I was pleased (and rather surprised) that it still worked. I then purchased a standard edition license as a thank you for what to my mind was a remarkably principled commitment to his promise of a lifetime license.
Great story. It is also worth mentioning that Ed Hamrick himself answers all support emails. They are only a sentence or two, but it’s just a remarkable thing.
Wow, I just realized this was the same VueScan. Back in the day, it opened up almost every "Made for Windows" scanner for the Mac. I'm impressed it's still going!
I have been trying to replace my old Canoscan LIDE 200 with a newer LIDE 400 for some time now (because I have a line of dead pixels), but there actually seems to be a scanner shortage on the German hardware market right now. Might be related to Covid and people buying scanners to work from home. For Canon definitely, but some other manufacturers seem to be sparse and more expensive as well. So this is a welcome alternative to at least be able to upgrade my MacOS finally.
I've been using this for 10 years. It's a fantastic piece of software and allows me to continue to use a Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV without any issues! My APS films are still scannable! Woop woop!
After I had to throw away a perfectly fine and good scanner because it didn't have Windows 7 drivers (let alone Linux), I now only buy hardware that's properly supported on Linux.
I've also been using this for several years. It may have an old look in the UI, but it works very well and is reliable. Honestly, what more could you ask?
The builtin scanner in macOS allows either previewing, or scanning into a file, but it can't save the preview into a file. Previwing is crucial in order to determine what to crop or rotate, but scanning another time after the preview wastes a lot of time.
The builtin scanner can rotate, but it can't preview the rotation. It has limited color correction capability (which is important for making black & white documents... more black & white, and well-readable). It can't save to multi page PDF. It can't tweak JPEG quality. It can't preview in color but save in black & white.
And OCR. Damn, so nice. It can generate PDFs with selectable and searchable text!
VueScan can do all of that. Strongly recommended if you need to scan more than a few pages on a regular basis. Well worth the price tag.
The only downside is that its UI is a bit complicated, with lots of settings. It should be regarded a power user tool.
When I buy furniture or another appliance, I throw away the paper manual and store the digitally scanned version. It's hard to find paper documents: there are too many. In comparison, finding digital documents is trivial.