Comment Re:The more things change (Score 1) 56
I have had similar experiences with other manufacturers as well. I bought myself a decent (as in approx US$500) scanner, after having spent about an hour working out whether or not it works with Linux. Since I only use Linux on my work computers, this is quite important to me. And the scanner I was investigating was claimed to work under Linux, so I bought it.
Once I got the thing running, I was grossly disappointed by the scanner software: it looks and behaves as if it had been designed and written by a bunch of students who are desperate to turn in their final assignment before graduating! Such a simple thing as marking on a prescan what areas I am interested in takes a solid minute!
I got so fed up with the crappy software from Epson that I finally got myself a computer with W10 on it, so I could use the miles better software provided for that platform. The sad thing is that the difference doesn't really have to be astronomical, if the people doing the job know what they are up to.
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Prescan: this is (in my view) a fundamental function of every scanner designed for scanning things on paper. You click a button on the screen, the scanner does a quick low-quality scan of the entire area it can scan and you get presented with the result. On this, you can then mark out the area(s) you want scanned, instead of having to scan the entire area in high quality. Since this may vary with every document you scan, it has to be something done easily and in little time.
Once I got the thing running, I was grossly disappointed by the scanner software: it looks and behaves as if it had been designed and written by a bunch of students who are desperate to turn in their final assignment before graduating! Such a simple thing as marking on a prescan what areas I am interested in takes a solid minute!
I got so fed up with the crappy software from Epson that I finally got myself a computer with W10 on it, so I could use the miles better software provided for that platform. The sad thing is that the difference doesn't really have to be astronomical, if the people doing the job know what they are up to.
--------------
Prescan: this is (in my view) a fundamental function of every scanner designed for scanning things on paper. You click a button on the screen, the scanner does a quick low-quality scan of the entire area it can scan and you get presented with the result. On this, you can then mark out the area(s) you want scanned, instead of having to scan the entire area in high quality. Since this may vary with every document you scan, it has to be something done easily and in little time.