Posted by khk

History

When I first got my EPSON Perfection 1200S I was very pleased that Sane was able to talk to the scanner and aquire some images without any problems – and without doing anything special. After a while however I found out that the scanner was not using all of it’s features. The EPSON backend was not able to determine the function level of the scanner and therefore choose the default level. It’s amazing what a little debugging output can tell you about software 🙂

So, the scanner was able to produce images. Being who I am this was not good enough for me 🙂 So I searched the web for some EPSON documentation. And thanks to EPSON’s open policy I actually found specs for the EPSON scanner language.

After a few hours I even understood how Sane backends work and what I had to do in order to modify it so that it would “know” about the 1200S capabilities.

… and then I found two projects which covered pretty much the same that I did. The EPSON backend was not acively being maintained, and therefore on the SANE web page there was no link to either of these two projects, also the modifications were never put back into the CVS repository.

Nevertheless I’m very thankful that both Christian Bucher and Clive Stubbings have kept the backend development alive for more than a year. I realized that if nobody is taking over the ownership of the backend again we would not have anything in the next release of SANE either. So I stepped up and now I’m maintaining the code that is in the CVS repository.

Here are the links to the two packages that this backend is based on: