Re: Why no Minolta Scanners?

From: EdHamrick@aol.com
Date: Wed Sep 13 2000 - 08:49:58 PDT

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    In a message dated 9/13/2000 10:08:42 AM EST, tangent@cyberport.com writes:

    > > I'm brand new to this list, and I was wondering if there was any
    > particular
    > > reason why there was no back-end for the Minolta range of scanners? Is
    it
    > > just a lack of interest, or is there a more insidious reason?

    There's no insidious reason. The person who was going to
    do it got the same documents I got under NDA from Minolta.
    I think the sane driver just didn't get done.

    If someone wants to go to the trouble to get the scsi command
    specs under NDA from Minolta, I'd be happy to send them the
    info I found about a few small inaccuracies in these documents.

    These documents are available from Minolta under NDA for
    their SCSI Dimage scanners. The USB Scan Dual II uses
    entirely different commands.

    A sane driver for the Minolta Scan Dual II can probably be
    done pretty easily by modifying the Avision driver (it's
    built by Avision and uses the standard Avision commands).
    I already posted a message showing how scsi commands
    are encapsulated on USB.

    The only thing that's needed to get the Scan Dual II working
    on Linux is a modification to the microtek.c pseudo-scsi
    driver that emulates a scsi device and sends the scsi
    commands over USB.

    Interestingly, this would also get the HP 5300C working
    under Linux, since it's also an Avision scanner and uses the
    same SCSI->USB encapsulation as the Scan Dual II.

    > Hamrick Software sells a very good bit of shareware called VueScan that
    > works wonderfully with Minolta's slide scanners. It works on Linux,
    > Macintosh and Windows, and it's so good that on Windows I use it instead
    > of Minolta's default TWAIN drivers.
    >
    > www.hamrick.com

    Thanks.

    > The only thing I could wish for now is better Gimp integration. :)

    You can get VueScan to start Gimp on Linux when it's done
    processing an image. You can use an arbitrary shell command
    to post-process the images.

    Regards,
    Ed Hamrick

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