Sometimes old tech is still better...

[commodorejohn]

Yeah, all-in-ones are uniformly crap. I've yet to encounter one where this is not the case. (And crazily enough, from what I've seen, they've gotten worse with time, at least at the consumer-electronics price point.) HP's a prime offender in the printer/scanner market, too - their hardware isn't great, their software is a bloated pile of feces, and these days it's damn near impossible to install the drivers without getting the full suite of crap along with it.

Coincidentally enough, right after I read this thread this morning, I made a stop by the recycle center, where what should I see but a Microtek E3! Looks to be in good condition, so I set it aside and I'm gonna see what they want for it tomorrow.

[commodorejohn]

Heh, nice I don't have SCSI in my Amiga (or even in my PC,) but it looked like it has a parallel-port connector as well, so hopefully I can use that in the meantime. I've been wanting to get a scanner again for a while since I'm looking to finally start a webcomic this year, and this'd be awfully handy since I wouldn't have to save up for a new one...

[commodorejohn]

I'm pretty sure you can get a cheap PCI SCSI card or and Amiga A2091 SCSI card on eBay for about $20 if you really want to bother getting into the world of SCSI (which has a learning slightly learning curve and can be finicky - but once set up is a nice interface protocol).

Yeah, to be sure - I already have a PCI SCSI card for PPC Mac, actually, I just haven't put it to use for lack of peripherals. I suppose I could probably just put my MDD G4 into service as a scanning/touchup machine, now that I think of it...

I think you can buy much better scanner today than MicroTek for its old price.

Yeah, but I certainly can't buy a better scanner today for recycle-center prices!

Most of the image issues sound like a combination  of the image getting automatically jpeg compressed, and then color  corrected and sharpened.  It wouldn't surprise me if the scan software  was bad enough to jpeg an image internally before exporting as a TIFF.  

Oh God, that's so perverse that I bet that's what they're actually doing :cry:

[commodorejohn]

I believe it is Adaptec, but what I'm not sure about is that there's a socketed EPROM on the board labeled "Apple" which I expect is some kind of BIOS ROM; if that's necessary, I kind of doubt it'll work on an x86 machine without replacing that.

[commodorejohn]

Okay, s'pose I'll give it a shot then. Don't think not being able to boot from a scanner should be an issue

[commodorejohn]

Well, as I expected, it had no scrap value, so I got it for free It's an E3 Plus, but it does seem to be SCSI - it's got one male and one female DB25, which I presume is for pass-through purposes. Haven't gotten a chance to test it, as I need an adapter cable for the SCSI card's newer port, but the glass is clean and intact, it powers on, the stepper motor works, and the light appears properly bright, so I'm betting it's going to work just fine

[commodorejohn]

But wait!  There was also an Enhanced Parallel Port version of the same scanner that ALSO had two connectors on the back:

Hah, go figure - and no markings on the case or information in the manual to distinguish the two... :/ Still, one of the two main ICs on the board is a 90C26 EPP-to-SCSI adapter, so...I guess it's SCSI? Then again, the pass-through port is labeled "PRINTER," so maybe not. Guess I'll find out...

Edit: Okay, turns out to have been an EPP scanner after all, apparently that chip is serving as a SCSI-to-EPP adapter rather than the other way around (the scanner software even recognizes it as a SCSI host adapter :rolleyes:) But she works, and while I haven't gotten a chance to run a real test, the image quality seems quite nice