| Tuesday, April 2, 2002 |
12:01 - Where have all the scanners gone?
http://www.microtekusa.com/macosx.html
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I have a Great Mystery of the Universe to unravel.
My scanner is a Microtek ScanMaker 6400XL. It cost me $800, and I bought it specifically because it has a 12x17-inch scan area. I need that much scanning surface, because there's not a single piece of original material that I need to scan that is on paper smaller than 9x12 inches. I'm not doing OCR text scanning of documents on letter-sized paper. I'm doing scans of drawings and comic pages.
I suffered for many months with a letter-sized (8.5x11") scanner, doing two exposures for each image-- one of the left side, one of the right, then stitching them together in Photoshop. This never worked out perfectly, because inexplicably, the two halves never lined up properly-- it's like the sensor was moving at different speeds on the right and left sides of the image, so if you lined up one part of the picture, another part would go all crooked. It's enough to drive a sane man mad! Mad, I tell you!
So I knew I needed an A3-size scanner. You know, 12x17". After all, professionals need these scanners, right? All those people who do comic pages, which are drawn on 11x17-inch Bristol board? Sure, it goes without saying that they need large-format scanners, and that they don't spend all their time cursing at Photoshop as they futilely try to align all the parts of the various segments of the scan. No-- there must be a better way.
But lo-- it's true! There was a Mustek scanner in 12x17", for only a couple hundred dollars! I got one. And it worked. For a while. Then it stopped. That's when I learned why Mustek is a name whose very utterance summons roiling dark clouds among the likes of graphic designers the world over; they're cheap as hell, so people will buy them-- but they sport life expectancies in the single-digit months. I have an artist friend who buys Mustek A3 scanners in 3-packs, so she can have some hope of her scanning capabilities lasting out the year. The scanners themselves are impossibly cheap, and the software is garbage (when I was using Windows, if I ever scanned anything, I could then press Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the process list-- and the scanner driver icon would be in the process list's title bar instead of the Windows logo, meaning that the foul stink of an impending crash was wafting about my nostrils already). But that's what you pay your $300 for, right?
So when I got my Mac, I also invested in a Microtek 6400XL. It's been a trusty workhorse-- nary a problem, beautiful fast scans, and it never destabilized a thing.
But only on Mac OS 9.
Microtek has taken a full year to release OS X-native drivers for their scanners; today, they finally have done so. But in the intervening months, I've had to make do with the horrific VueScan (which I've ranted about before), or rebooting into OS 9 if I want to use real working software. On top of which is the fact that OS X doesn't allow you to boot the system and then turn on your SCSI devices-- you have to have them powered up at boot time for the OS to load the shims for them. An annoyance that has forced many a reboot out of me. Slow, unpredictable scan results and lots of forced reboots-- boy, it doesn't get any better'n this, does it?
But look! Hallelujah! Today they've released the driver and the new version of ScanWizard Pro-- for OS X! Hip hip hooray! Well... okay, so right now only one scanner is supported, but they've posted a release schedule so I can see when my 6400XL will be supported! Hosanna! Ho-- er... wait. Um... no. There must be some mistake. My scanner . . . is not on the list.
A weepy call to Microtek confirmed that this list is not "complete", and that they will be adding more "older scanners" to it as time goes on. But... well, hell. My scanner is only 2 years old. Okay-- well, here's where it gets really surreal.
I figure, hey: SCSI is the way of the past anyway, right? Why don't I just get myself a new 12x17" scanner with FireWire or (failing that) USB? It'll be newer, so it'll be supported soon. And the interface will be faster and hot-pluggable. What have I got to lose?
I start looking through Microtek's product pages. I look at UMAX. I look at HP, Canon... anybody I can think of. And guess what? While all the consumer and prosumer scanners are USB or FireWire, the professional large-format scanners are all still SCSI. Why?
Oh, and Microtek's current equivalent of my 6400XL, the 9600XL, is up to $1400. Of course it's still SCSI.
What's happening here? Is the market for large-format scanners that stagnant? Is nobody buying these things? What I noticed in my travels, much to my horror, was that almost noboody is making large-format scanners anymore. At all. They just aren't to be found on the product pages. Oh, there are legal size scanners-- 8.5x14", for those extra-long lawyers' bills, presumably. (Or maybe all the smaller sheets are actually illegal.) But the 12x17" size I need? Nooooo. Nowhere to be found, except in a few obscure niches. HP has a $3000 one. Canon has a similarly godawful-priced one. Microtek has three, ranging in price from the $1400 9600XL to some in the $10K range... but again, they're all obstinately SCSI.
Which brings me around to the mystery of the universe that I mentioned. Why is this happening? Don't the scanner companies have a whole publishing and graphic design industry to support? We need these scanners. Where the hell are they going to come from? The scanner companies are making all their money nowadays with the ridiculously garbaceous (I'm laying claim to that word right now) $80 one-touch scanners that they bundle with new Dells and stack in supermarket checkout lines and fling out over Times Square as party favors on New Year's. The high-end scanners are getting second, or third or fourth, billing. To look at the product lineups, you'd think nobody wanted them at all.
But there has to still be demand!
My dreams of a FireWire large-format scanner that I can afford are evaporating. What makes it so galling is that the prospect for such a product used to be there-- large-format scanners used to be ubiquitous. Every business had one. The ISP where I worked had one. It was just another variation. But now... well, it's market forces that have brought about this change, so I can't argue, I guess. If they've seen sales fall so much that it's no longer in their interest to produce scanners for that market, then I guess I can only accept that. But I just can't understand how demand can be so slim. Doesn't every artist on the face of the planet need a scanner like the 9600XL?
Oh, and just watch: Someone will mail me to point out a $300 FireWire 12x17" scanner from Mustek. With native OS X support. And I'll buy one, and it will explode into flaming molten shards, rendering my room uninhabitable and costing me an eye and my right arm.
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