VueScan Newsletter - December 2022
Welcome and Festive Greetings!
Hello to all our regular readers and a very warm welcome to our new readers!
Firstly, thank you very much for your wonderful response to our request for preview information in the last newsletter.
We are delighted to share that we have received thousands of responses regarding our image processing algorithms, specifically for improving automatic cropping of transparencies. This feedback has been incredibly valuable to us as we continue to refine our algorithms. Thank you to everyone who has provided their input!
It is having such a wonderful customer base that helps us to continuously improve and enhance VueScan - so we are very grateful to all of you!
Please continue to contact us with all your product suggestions and comments, many of our improvements are as a direct response to your requests.
And if you do use Facebook, please continue to add reviews for us. As a small company it really helps us – so, once again, thank you. (And thank you for telling your friends and colleagues about us.) Remember you can contact us for technical support (we need a Problem Report) and any general enquiries, suggestions or feedback here
It only remains for us to wish all of our customers and your families a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Beverley.
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Thank you and happy reading!
VueScan Updates
Since the last newsletter, we’ve released VueScan 9.7.96; 9.7.95 and 9.7.94
What’s new in version 9.7.96
- Added numerous speed improvements
- Build with latest Mac, Windows and Linux compilers
- Used more compiler optimization (-O3 instead of -O2)
- Other small speed improvements
- Added support for Epson ET-2400
- Fixed problem with Canon MF642
- Fixed problem with scanning multiple paper sizes with some Fujitsu document scanners
- Fixed problem with delay after flatbed scan on some eSCL scanners
- Improved scan quality in dark areas of some Genesys Logic scanners
- Added support for multi-sampling with some Epson scanners
- Added support for using
Prefs | Network scannersset toManualwith eSCL scanners - Automatically switches to x64 version on Mac with some Epson scanners using plugins
What’s new in version 9.7.95
- Added support for macOS Ventura
- Improved scan quality of some Canon LiDE scanners
- Canon LiDE 110
- Canon LiDE 120
- Canon LiDE 210
- Canon LiDE 220
- Fixed problem with missing resolutions on some Epson scanners
- Fixed problem with document feeder scans not saving properly
- Fixed problem with occasional corrupted install on macOS
- Fixed problem with HP Officejet Pro 9010
What’s new in version 9.7.94
- Many improvements for Epson Perfection scanners
- More resolutions with some scanners
- Higher resolutions with some scanners
- Better support for V500/V550/V600
- Displays PDF thumbnails while scanning
- Always starts up with dock visible
- Fixed problem with preview/scan when both resolutions identical
Holiday greetings from Ed Hamrick – one of the developers of VueScan
Ho! Ho! Ho! (Or should I say ARM, ARM, ARM :) ) Merry Christmas.
I bought myself an M2 MacBook Air, and I love it – the ARM processor is blazing fast! David got one last Christmas, and my son can’t have a better computer than me :) And interestingly, I can do all the VueScan builds on it: 32-bit Intel, 64-bit Intel and 64-bit ARM, all three for Mac, Windows and Linux (and 32-bit ARM for Linux/Raspberry Pi). I can now build and release VueScan in less than 5 minutes – eighteen 10 Mbyte files – it’s a really fast computer. And I can use it on an airplane tray table (I’m tall) – I love it!
Windows 11 ARM is amazing too. I run it on my new MacBook Air using Parallels and I even forget I’m not using the MacBook Pro I used to use. It’s probably the fastest Windows 11 system I’ve ever used, and it runs 64-bit ARM programs natively as well 32-bit Intel and 64-bit Intel programs (with something similar to Rosetta) without any problem (and quite fast).
Necessity is the mother of invention, and after years of not being able to get USB devices running on Windows 10/11 ARM, I figured out how to do it. It works great now (and VueScan is the only way to use USB scanners on Windows 11 ARM). David wrote up a How-To Guide on our support page if you’re curious.
When I added more resolutions for Epson scanners (including scanning at higher than the optical dpi if the motor dpi supported it), the multi-sample scanning stopped working.
Multi-sample scanning on Epson takes advantage of the fact that Epson scanners can scan at X and Y resolutions independently. For instance, if someone is scanning at 1600 dpi but wants less noise in the scan, they can set Input | Number of samples to “4” and it will scan at 6400 dpi in the Y direction and average every 4 scan lines, increasing the number of effective noise-free bits by log2(4) = 2 additional bits.
The re-released version of 9.7.95 does this and seems to work in all the test cases I used with the V600. Someone else tested this with the V850 and it also worked.
Another thing that people have asked me about for many years is why their V750 or V850 is displayed in VueScan as a V700 or V800. It turns out that the 00 and 50 versions use the same USB Product ID, and I could never figure out how to tell the difference (in more than a decade). One of our customers in Australia (thanks Matt!) noticed that the USB device reported V850 in a place I hadn’t noticed, and he helped me test a few ways to differentiate between these two models. I re-released 9.7.96 today with this improvement.
David is working night and day on one of his amazing improvements to VueScan (He did the thumbnail improvements too).
We’ve had a great response from customers for setting Prefs | Preview data and he now has thousands of images to use to test a new, improved automatic cropping algorithm for photos on a flatbed, slides and negatives in a film scanner, and slides and negative strips on a flatbed with a transparency adapter. He’s up to more than 95% accuracy, but being the perfectionist he is, he’s hoping to improve this a bit more before integrating it into VueScan in January (maybe February). We’re using the OpenCV (Open Computer Vision) library as the underlying engine for this, and this has helped a lot.
We have a lot of exciting improvements to VueScan in the pipeline – both adding support for more scanners and adding new features for all scanners. Any time you can tell one of your friends or acquaintances about VueScan, it’s always appreciated!
Again, Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year!
Ed Hamrick
Customer Comment
We receive many kind comments from our customers, and we appreciate it very much. We reply to all your emails so please continue to send them in.
From Andy in Australia:
Hello - a little story to gladden your hearts; I recently purchased HP4100 scanner/printer/copier. The HP software was hard to try to get going to do scanning although it works quite well doing printing. The HP scanner software was online and required personal details, but I couldn’t do scanning. In frustration I went to use my older scanner/Hamrick SW, and I saw there was an update. After updating, the HP scanner worked perfectly without ‘joining’ HP website! Well done Hamrick! Andy.
From Ron in the USA. I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued product support. There are very few organizations and individuals who are so committed to customer satisfaction. It shouldn’t go unnoticed.
Thank you!!!
Ron.