Greetings, This may not be a particularly useful e-mail since it will be a little short on specifics, but hopefully it may provide enough information to give someone (with more knowledge of SANE internals than I have) an idea of what might be going on.
Once upon a time, I used my Microtek X6 USB with Windows 2000 and with SANE on Linux. The performance under both was about equal. This was on a 750MHz Athlon system with a VIA chipset using some variant of the 2.4 kernel. Then, somewhere along the line of 2.4 kernel versions (using the uhci, or "alternate" UHCI driver) and SANE versions, things stopped working: The scanner lamp would turn on and move about an inch before "hanging." I can't recall whether this locked up the machine or not. Unfortunately I don't know whether this problem was ever resolved, because I stopped using said Athlon system and now pretty much exclusively use my laptop, which is a 700MHz Pentium III. Now on my laptop (still using the "alternate" uhci kernel driver), scanning works but is much slower than it was before. (Of course this could be due to the new hardware, but there is near parity in the two machines' capabilities.) I tried a couple of color scans at 200dpi and 300dpi, and the scanner head will move about an inch, pause for a few seconds, move another inch, pause, and so on. (Before, the motion was pretty much continuous.) It's as if the scanner is producing data too quickly and has to wait for the computer to catch up (although this doesn't seem very likely). I'd be happy to do additional testing and provide more data, if someone would tell me what sort of data (perhaps turn on debugging somewhere and send log output?) would be interesting. Of course, I am glad that even though it's slow, it works! :-) Cheers, Jeremy -- Jeremy L. Rosenberger * [email protected] http://home.frii.com/~jeremy/
