| Thursday, January 31, 2002 |
21:26 - It's time for a little something unexpected...
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VueScan, by Ed Hamrick, is the all-purpose Mac OS X scanner software that everyone's using because no scanner makers have brought out drivers yet.
This is VueScan:
This is me using VueScan:
See, here's the thing. VueScan is the most horrible, infuriating, ear-bleedingly godawful piece of software that it has ever been my displeasure to use.
Well, okay, maybe that's not fair. It's not maliciously bad, and Hamrick has done a really admirable job of delivering a piece of software that works on Windows, Mac OS (9 and X), and Linux, and works with almost all kinds of scanners in the world, whether parallel, SCSI, USB, or FireWire. Really remarkable.
But... aaarrgh!
A Preview pass in my Microtek software, under OS 9, takes about twenty seconds. I make my adjustments, and then the full scan pass takes another twenty seconds. It zips along. I click, spin around twice in my chair, and I've got a nicely color-balanced image in Photoshop to play with. All the detail is there and available for me to tweak with the level sliders.
But under VueScan, a simple Preview pass takes ninety seconds. The full scan takes just as long. Heaven forbid I should ever have to scan more than one page-- I'd be here all night. But that's not the worst part! The worst part is that the color-balance sliders seem to do no good at all! What I scan tend to be grayscale pencil drawings, and the Microtek software (which doesn't run in OS X) picks up all the detail perfectly. But no matter how I twist the sliders, VueScan seems to capture a bright, near-white field-- only the heaviest lines show up at all, and crashing the sliders back and forth barely makes any difference at all.
But that's not all! If I move the selection area around and do another Preview pass (another 90 seconds of my life gone), the image will look nothing like the previous one. It'll have a splotch right in the middle of bright, sun-like white, edged with an intense bleed of yellow, like film exposed to direct sunlight. Needless to say, I can't use whatever image comes out of that. So I preview again (90 seconds-- "Jeopardy" theme plays three or four times), and this time the field is made up of alternating lines of dark blue, red, yellow, black, ochre, and band-aid color. huh? At this point, my only hope is to shut down the program and start over again, because if I let it live it will merely sit there Buddha-like, but mocking me-- the Mocking Bodhisattva of Glaring Monochromatic Light.
It's times like this that, utterly defeated, I grope for the Startup Disk panel and reboot into OS 9, willing to endure five minutes of booting, scanning, rebooting, and launching all my seventeen accustomed apps again, just so I can scan some pages in peace and quiet.
That's the big weakness OS X has right now: scanning. (Well, the big one for me.) Scanning is a dreary, sad tale. Because Photoshop isn't out yet-- Real Soon Now, says Adobe-- none of the scanner manufacturers seem to have any incentive to develop native drivers. Some have, but of course not Microtek. I've had an e-mail response from them saying they hope to have OS X support "in the very near future", but I'm not expecting much from that.
"Why don't I just get another scanner?" Excellent question! Why, because I need an 11x17-inch scan bed-- or A3-size, if you prefer-- and Microtek is the only manufacturer who makes one, aside from Mustek (and I have friends who buy Mustek scanners three at a time, because they dissolve right before your eyes. I'm not kidding-- they're that cheap and crappy), that's remotely affordable ($1000). Some other ones are available, but they start at $3000. And that's still SCSI we're talking here, not USB-- let alone FireWire.
(I daresay that if I could have a FireWire version of my Microtek 6400XL, it would work perfectly in Classic mode with the Microtek software.)
SCSI in OS X is a strange bird in any case. You have to have your SCSI devices turned on at boot time, or it won't load the shims for them. This is a Darwin problem, Adaptec has told me-- and a topic of hot debate among Darwin developers and Apple. They'd better address this problem, or else OS X will have a hard time being accepted in the server market, where SCSI is still very entrenched. Not to mention the installed Mac graphics market, who was used to SCSI being the default primary system bus right up until 1998, when Apple went to IDE to cut costs and lower reliability and speed.
So now I'm stuck, until such time as someone should see fit to make a FireWire A3 scanner that I can afford, or Microtek should get around to making OS X-native scanner software, whichever comes first. I'm not sure which is more likely. But unless I'm willing to reboot into OS 9 every time I want to scan something, or maybe borrow one of Kris' old 8100s to use as a scanning box (hey, not a bad idea), I'm stuck using VueScan. It continues to escape me how the thing can keep getting such glowing, five-star reviews over at VersionTracker, gushing over its fantastic color-control abilities. Sure, Hamrick updates it every few days with a new beta, and he's been very responsive and helpful to me in my e-mail exchanges with him. But dammit, man! It got faster about ten versions ago, after he troubleshot my configuration-- and then it got worse again just a couple of weeks ago! And I can never tell whether the color-handling crappiness is there or not-- it keeps coming and going! I can't tell if it's a lamp heating issue, because scanning takes so long that the lamp is a completely different temperature at the start of the scan than at the end (VueScan turns off the lamp between scan passes)! Aaaauuugh!
... Okay.... okay. I'm done. I'm okay.
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