Sun Feb 23 14:58:58 PST 2003

So I was thinking of purchasing a new scanner to scan in photos that we gotten from various people of the wedding and stuff like that. I figured it would be nice to get a scanner that was supported under Linux. In general I’ve found that linux-supported stuff tends to be slightly higher quality, and usually there are more of them so it’s less likely that I’m buying some hunk-o’-junk without realizing it. I had picked out a Epson 1260 scanner, which was on sale at CompUSA for a rather nice price with a $30 rebate as well. But when visiting with my parents on Saturday for Mom’s birthday, they told me that they weren’t using the scanner I’d loaned to Mom for use at the Church.

So I got that scanner back (after a year or so of it being over at their place unused), and then went online to the sane home page to see if it was supported under linux. Sure enough, it was there, an Agfa SnapScan1212u. Unfortunately, what wasn’t obvious is that I needed to get the firmware binary into a known place so that the software could load the necessary firmware into the scanner before it would work correctly. Fortunately, a couple of websites later I had it mostly figured out (thanks largely to http://hem.fyristorg.com/henrikj/snapscan/) and copied the correct file, SnapScan1212U_2.bin file from the driver CD into the /etc/sane.d directory and then edited /etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf to point to the .bin file (also removed the space in the filename). After that, xsane worked, but only appears to be able to save raw RGB files, so I switched to gimp, and then use the ‘acquire’ menu to invoke sane. That works out pretty well.

The scanner quality is reasonably good. I only does 600×600, but for scanning in photos it appears to be plenty good enough, and the files that it generates off a 4×5 photograph are pretty huge, around 800K a pop in .jpg format. It’s probably overkill, but I’m not sure how worried I should be about it. As long as general sections still fit on CD, it’s all good.

Next I need to figure out a good way of ripping and encoding CDs :-)