Going SANE

I recently aquired a new toy.
Yes, anotheir one.
This one i have only for the time being - as it will eventually end up at the clients desk.
But for now - ladies and gentlemen - i present to you:
The Plustek OpticSlim 2400 USB scanner.
For a strangely low price - you can get one too !
Lets be honest - this is low end equipment.
Its designed to work with laptops - thus it requires no externall power source, other then the 5v that your usb2 port can provide.
It also looks pretty cool - its slim, a nice gray metallic, not much bigger then the standard A4 sheet.
And the best part of it all:
it works on Linux with almost no problems :)
There are a few catches that i got caught up in, mostly because last time i used SANE was about 2 years ago.

1. You need to extract the firmware from the windows drivers.
   This isnt too obvoius - but it seems that alot of hardware thats usb connected these days doesnt have any firmware in them what so ever (besides the bare minimum that is needed to upload the real firmware). This is the case with some modems, printers and - yes - scanners.
   So you basicly need to have a M$ system somewhere to get the firmware.
2. Once its all in there - you need to take a look at your permissions.
   First thing - when playing around - you might as well do it as root.
   You probably dont have the hotplug tools that change perms on the fly when you connect something.
   Im sure they arent in any way sugdested or bundled with SANE in debian, so you might have to get that package.
3. AFAIK this is driver specific - so it might, or might not concearn you:
   the scanner has a 15 wait to heat up the lamp on every scan you make. Loosing minutes - yes, but nontheless the speed is pretty good, so im not going to bitch about it.
   I read somewhere that its a driver bug, but got no such response in #sane on freenode - so this might not be true. I dont really have a windows machine to test it on and see if its the same there.

All in all - i really like it. It worked almost out of the box - and the problems ive had were only my fault.
I would consider getting one for myself, but i would rather get a digitall cam, or an ipod B)

In (un)related news - the gallery "feature" is now fixed, soon i will post some images scanned with this puppy in there :)