Sad News - greendyk.nl Website Closing Down

[rprosperi]

(12-13-2018 02:16 PM)burkhard Wrote:  I hate to wander the thread too far afield, but the lack of driver support for old scanners (which are perfectly fine) in newer operating systems is a big problem. The scanner manufacturers sadly don't care about supporting their old hardware and lay the blame on the OS maker. The OS maker in turn does the same, leaving the consumer in the lurch.

A really good *universal* (well near-universal at least) scanner software is VueScan by Hamrick software. Everything driver-wise is built-in. They continually put out updates to cover OS changes and add new scanners frequently as well. I bought my copy back a little over 4 years ago and have had many free upgrades since then (it prompts you that new one is available). It lets me use my old but nice Epson 2450 scanner which would otherwise be dead in the water. It does claim to support automatic document feeder scanners as well, although I haven't tried that.

I agree, it has somehow become 'acceptable' for scanner manufacturers to abandon s/w support typically after providing updates for 1 OS version past the original release, as most manufacturers seem to do this. I imagine they justify this presuming folks that actually use dedicated scanners are either in corporations or high-end businesses and will simply be OK with getting a new model.

Thanks for info about VueScan; it supports a prodigious number of scanners (they claim > 5000, though ironically not the one noted above ). Does the product include OCR software and if so which one, there are only 2 or 3 OCR technology vendors, so these folks no doubt licensed one? A quick look through the manual implies the only OCR output option is text?

It would indeed be nice to maintain the same scanning s/w as devices come and go, assuming it does everything I need. Their license is also quite reasonable, much better than most.