Dear friends, I have been a happy sane and xsane user for years. I have two Epson 1660 Photo scanners and they work very well (maybe except warming up).
After a demonstration of sane and Digikam, my 60 year old uncle decided to drop Windows and migrate to GNU/Linux. He would like to scan his 35 mm photos. He has several hundreds of them, maybe thousands. So I did some testings and I have some questions: 1) Sane + iscan If I buy an Epson Perfection v350 or Epson Perfection v500, I guess I have to use iscan. Is plugging sane into iscan a reliable solution? Until now, I have only been using Sane native products. Are there known incompatibilities using sane with iscan? 2) ieee1394 The other possibility would be to buy a Perfection V700, which has USB + ieee1394 and is fully supported by sane. Just two questions: + Is scanning 35mm films faster using ieee1394 + Does sane support the old or the new firewire stack or both? The target system is a Debian SID, which only supports the new firewire stack. + Is Sane ieee1394 more stable than USB scanning? I experienced some warming problems with USB. Previously I had an SCSI scanner and it never hanged during warm-up. 3) Quality of colors I am planning 2400 dpi scans. More generaly, is there a wide difference between the color grades of a low budget Epson v350 and a middle range Epson v700? Is it worth spending more money for better colors. I did some testing with my Epson 1660 Photo and the colors look okay after correction. Can it bring better colors to spend more money? Thank you very much for your time and efforts in developing Sane. Kind regards, Jean-Michel
