Recycled Computing

Through a Scanner, Darkly Indeed

- 2010.01.08

Popularity: LEMLEMLEMLEM

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It's always man against technology, and in the case of recycling old tech, the struggle is squared.

Way back before Christmas break, my boss had found a couple of old CanoScan LiDE 50 scanners hiding in our school. In sort of a banzai challenge, he gave them to me to see if "Mr. Legacy" could get them working.

I have always felt that you can never have too many scanners and that you should never let old tech go to waste. I thought it would be an easy matter to download the drivers from Canon's website, install them, and starting scanning.

"Ha, ha", laughed the Tech Gods. "This puny mortal has no chance against Planned Obsolescence."

It turns out that Canon does not support the LiDE 50 in OS X "Leopard". To be fair, it proved to be difficult to install Canon's scanner utility in Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" (maybe it was due to the G3 processor) or Windows XP and get the scanner to work.

Of course, XSane (the scanner application include with Ubuntu) works fine.

A Commercial Solution

This the time for the third party software! In fact, there is a wonderful application called VueScan that supports all sorts of scanners. It also is one of the most complete scanner programs that I have seen. It offers a level of control that is not present in the manufacturer's software. If you do a lot of scanning and need to produce a quality product, you might want to shell out $40 for VueScan.

And therein lies the rub. Schools do not have $40 to shell out to make $50 scanners work. I needed something free.

SANE Doesn't Like Tiger

This lead to fruitless searches on the Internet. Mr. Mike, our in house computer hardware and software repairman, pointed me towards SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy), some free software for Linux. Mr. Mike is also "Mr. Linux" around here and has been encouraging me when I installed Linux on my home Dell computer. As I mention above, the XSane software included with Ubuntu works fine with the CanoScan LiDE 50.

So SANE, the version ported for Mac OS X, should work, shouldn't it?

"Not so fast, monkey-boy," pronounced the Tech Gods. SANE would just not play nice with the scanner. I couldn't seem to get Image Capture to recognize the hardware. The SANE Preference Pane just didn't seem to configure the Canon scanner.

I would have pulled out my hair, but I have so little of it left.

Help from the Mac Community

So I went to Mac Forums, started a new thread, and waited hopefully for some one to give me a solution. A member with the nom de plume of "wherehouse" had an old LiDE 30 that worked with an application named Snac, which was written specifically to make SANE easy to use for OS X users. I downloaded the free application and found that it was written to replace the SANE front-end, which the author of Snac had discovered was too unstable for his liking. I used SANE's back-end with the Snac front-end, and Zowey! The CanoScan LiDE 50 worked!

Snac scanner software for Mac OS X
Snac lets you preview and crop your scans.

Snac is a very simple front-end that is perfect for my high school students. Yes, they can play complex video games, use Facebook and Twitter, and email like crazy, but scanning....

This does not bode well for our Social Security checks.

Once again, thanks "wherehouse" and Mac Forums! Problem solved! LEM

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