That’s the last time I buy a Canon scanner. Doesn’t even have TWAIN drivers. I mean, HELLO! Canon? yeah, the early nineties called and they want you to start using their technology.
I was working on a slideshow for a wedding, and I needed to scan handwriting for the title screen. So, I plugged in my old Canon N1220U to my WinXP box. didn’t work. Well, served me right. I had turned my old WinXP box into a linux box, and turned my Win98 box into my main WinXP box (follow that?). Anyway, silly me thought that a plug-N-Play USB scanner that worked on my other Windows system should work just fine on the new Windows system: I mean, a driver’s a driver, right? Hmmmm, apparently not.
So then I decided to give the scanner a try on my Powerbook. No go. None of the built-in apps recongnize it. Hmm, okay, so I direct my trusty browser over to the Canon site to get the latest drivers. They claim to support it under OSX, but get this, it ONLY WORKS WITH PHOTOSHOP. Device driver??? Sounds like a PS plugin to me. Anyway, so I even tried a few other things like VueScan. no go. It recognized the scanner, but couldn’t open it, and when it did, the app froze. Grrr…
By this time, it was getting late, and I needed to finish this thing rather quickly. So, I go to Best Buy and grab the Canon LiDE-30, thinking, well, I like the quality of the images from the Canon, maybe the newer ones have better support (a quick check on their site reveals that it’s designed to work with OSX). So, I get this scanner back home and install the software. Um, worst. software. ever. It’s some god-awful ugly app that looks like a bad imitation of OSX 10.0, complete with gaudy pinstripes and everything. And, guess what? It STILL doesn’t work with the built-in capture software in OSX. Yeesh.
Okay, whatever, at least now I can scan the photos. Get the project done, but now I have 2 scanners, neither of which I’m completely happy with. Well, at least I’m getting a $30 rebate on the new one.
So, a few months later, and I’m messing around on my Powerbook, and I happen to look at the system profiler. It has a function that lists log entries. for some reason, the console log is taking FOREVER to load up. Once it’s done, it reveals that the log file is 29.5 MB That’s MEGABYTES. What the hey? So I look at the file, and it’s line after line of
Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8717
Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8718
So, I do a quick google on this log message, and lo and behold, I’m not the only one! Apparently, the scanner starts 2 processes that continuously poll for the scanner. When they don’t find it, they log a message to the console log. Oy Vey.
That’s the last time I buy a Canon scanner.
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