Scanner problem

English Hardware
1

Hi all, I have found an unused Epson 1260 scanner, so I thought I could hook it up to my desktop and get it working. I know it’s old, but for my needs it will do.

It is connected via USB and when I start xsane or scanlite, it detects the scanner without issues. The problem I do have is that it takes about 30s from when I select a preview scan, to when something actually happens on the scanner. Other than that it works ok. It uses the plustek driver and I have had a look in the scan.d/dll.conf file, only the plustek name is commented out.

Anyone have an idea as to why it does this? I have openSuse 13.2 64-bit installed.

2

Well if it works then you can’t complain that an OLD scanner is slow to start LOL

Did you set it up in Yast?

Is your system as old as the scanner??

3

If my memory serves me correctly, I also used to own that scanner (many years ago) .

And my recollection is that is an incredibly slow scanner and what you are seeing may be nominal behaviour.

Have you tested this under MS-Windows or under a different GNU/Linux distribution for a baseline comparison ?

4

Whilst I can accept a slow scanning speed due to its age, I can’t believe it takes about 30s, for the scanner to intercept a scan request over USB, figure out what that command means and then starts scanning. My PC is not that old.

I didn’t need to set it up as it was automatically found. I went into Yast and double checked the settings and they seemed to be ok. I’ll delete it and start from scratch just in case. I’ll try a windoze machine as well, thanks

5

Remember that, on first scan or after a number of minutes of inactivity, a desk scanner will turn on the light and wait for some time - maybe 10 or 20s - for it to warm up, to avoid color distortions when scanning. At least that’s how my old but trusty HP3800 behaves.

If you scan another page immediately (or perhaps less than a minute) after, there’s no such wait - unless the driver resets the scanner, that is.

Perhaps your scanner just has a larger warm-up time. See if you can find a manual for it online, the warm-up time is probably included in the specs.