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Epson Perfection 1260 Photo - How to enable 48bit scanning

Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2016 11:36 pm
by gilthanaz
[Problem]
To archive analog family photos and bring them to the digital world, we've recently found a very cheap "Epson Perfection 1260 Photo" at a pawn shop. It came without a driver disk but being a not-that-old USB-Scanner, we've expected it to work out of the box on Windows. The scanner supposedly has the ability to scan with 16-bit per color channel (usually 8-bit on your every-day scanner), and for archiving purposes it's usually a good idea to try and preserve material with the highest possible color depth and a meaningful resolution (600dpi+, depending on Material). Well, we were very wrong about the scanner easily working: Not only does it not work on anything more recent than Windows Vista, but also only on 32-bit drivers for that. Now, Epson did a very good job in customer care - not...

* There is no driver for Win7, Win8, Win8.1 or Windows 10. The support site itself points to some software that brings a TWAIN driver that should work with Epson Scanners, but buying that software is almost the price you'd pay to get a more recent model that works on Win7+ OS's.

* Extensive (hours and hours) of google-fu brought up some methods to get a vista driver work on Windows 7 and supposedly Windows 8, but for that you'd have to disable drive signature enforcement and do other stunts to finally have a device in the list that says "The Device is working properly", but in fact doesn't do anything and definitely not with 16 bits per color channel.

* After some check on our Old-Notebooks-Pile, we've even found a working one with Windows Vista 32 bit. So we installed the driver, just to find out that the "Epson Scan Utility" itself is nowhere to be found on the Epson Drivers/Support pages. Since the Printer came without CD that posed to be a problem, because ...

* ... the default scan program of Windows or anything else we've tried (Gimp2, Imaging, ...) would only support 8 bit per color channel, when the scanner is supposed to be able to scan 16 bit per color channel.

* After about 10 hours (nope, not exaggerating) of research and experiments, I've decided to let the idea to use this scanner on windows die and focused to get something done ;)

[Solution]
I've set up an older notebook, did a hardware check (And indeed, one memory module was faulty! Never work on unchecked hardware!) and installed Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 - that took something like 20 minutes and 2 or 3 minutes of actual doing something, like getting a coffee or two.

Right after the very basic installation, I've installed XSane and did not expect much, but... the configuration showed 14 bit per channel instead o the default 8! It appears that the scanner is "only" doing real 14-bit per channel, but in the end I finally had my test photo scanned with 3x16bit color depth @ 600 dpi. And besides working out of the box, the sane backend had a lot of preconfigured settings for some of the scanners special functions, like scanning photo negatives of different types (AGFA, Kodak, ...).

I'm now happily scanning at the highest possible quality the setup allows :)

Re: Epson Perfection 1260 Photo - How to enable 48bit scanni

Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2016 9:40 pm
by gilthanaz
XSane and Skanlite etc. "only" offer 8 and 14bit color depth per channel for this scanner. I'm currently trying to find out why this is the case. I've tested using the command line to force the scanner to 16-bit color depth per channel:

Code: Select all

scanimage --device "plustek:libusb:003:003" --mode Color --resolution 600 --depth 16  > ~/16bittest.png
The shell output looks like there are no real 16-bit at all, because:
scanimage: rounded value of depth from 16 to 14
Hm... Let's see what help gives:
Type ``scanimage --help -d DEVICE'' to get list of all options for DEVICE.

List of available devices:
plustek:libusb:003:003
Alright, let's do that!

Code: Select all

scanimage --help -d plustek:libusb:003:003
Options specific to device `plustek:libusb:003:003':
Scan Mode:
--mode Lineart|Gray|Color [Color]
Selects the scan mode (e.g., lineart, monochrome, or color).
--depth 8|14bit [8]
Number of bits per sample, typical values are 1 for "line-art" and 8
for multibit scans.
--source Normal|Transparency|Negative [inactive]
Selects the scan source (such as a document-feeder).
--resolution 50..2400dpi [50]
Sets the resolution of the scanned image.
--preview[=(yes|no)] [no]
Request a preview-quality scan.
Alright, the device (or driver) only offer 8 or 14 bit, so when we tried to specify 16, that was rounded to the nearest possible value (14). Now we at least know where the values etc. are coming from...

Let's try to find out more.

Code: Select all

lsusb | grep 1260
results in:
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 04b8:011d Seiko Epson Corp. GT-7300U [Perfection 1260/1260 PHOTO]
Looks like there's a Epson linux software available - let's see where this leads us:
https://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/sup ... eoid=38581

The links there are dead, but some google-fu reveals:
http://support.epson.net/linux/en/iscan_c.html

More useful links (german, tho):
https://www.canox.net/2016/05/epson-dru ... 16-04-lts/
https://www.canox.net/2015/12/epson-dru ... 14-04-lts/







<To be continued>