Scanner hell
I'm appaled by the poor support for Canon scanners in OS X. I have a CanoScan LIDE 30 (one of those really flat ones), and on the box and product pages it is said that it works in OSX. Right. If you're a friggin' OS X die-hard uber-geek maybe, but not for normal people.
Let me explain the process of driver installation, as devised by Canon:
Download CanoScan Toolbox for OS X (Tiger supported);
Install it (at this step I hung, as it complained about me not having enough privilidges to write a certain file; yet it didn't ask for admin privilidges);
Download the actual driver;
Install it, which requires you to somehow magically know that there's a plug-in directory where you're supposed to put it.
Now, that's what I call an installation process not worthy of OS X. It uses old VISE installers and what not; I expect more from such a big firm, especially taking into account that Canon is a company who's expertise lies in *imaging*, and the Mac obviously has a strong presence in that market.
But anyway, I had no luck when using those 'drivers', as the ToolBox app wouldn't install. So, in a move that would please the OSS zealots reading this, I tried installing and using SANE. No good. Everything (4 packages) installed fine, but yet nothing would work as told. Damnit. And as SANE uses Apple's installer, I can only remove those files manually. Damnit.
So, I *had* to resort to VueScan. 3rd Party software in order for my scanner to work. Right. This scanner even worked fine on Linux! Plugging it in was all I needed to do on SuSE 9.3. This is not what I come to expect from Apple and Canon. Canon scanner should work out of the box on OS X. There is no excuse for this mess.
Let me explain the process of driver installation, as devised by Canon:
Now, that's what I call an installation process not worthy of OS X. It uses old VISE installers and what not; I expect more from such a big firm, especially taking into account that Canon is a company who's expertise lies in *imaging*, and the Mac obviously has a strong presence in that market.
But anyway, I had no luck when using those 'drivers', as the ToolBox app wouldn't install. So, in a move that would please the OSS zealots reading this, I tried installing and using SANE. No good. Everything (4 packages) installed fine, but yet nothing would work as told. Damnit. And as SANE uses Apple's installer, I can only remove those files manually. Damnit.
So, I *had* to resort to VueScan. 3rd Party software in order for my scanner to work. Right. This scanner even worked fine on Linux! Plugging it in was all I needed to do on SuSE 9.3. This is not what I come to expect from Apple and Canon. Canon scanner should work out of the box on OS X. There is no excuse for this mess.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, July 10, 2005 at 15:37.
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4:58 AM, byYes, those Canon LIDEs are nasty, I have a model 50 and had to resort to VueScan as well. Canon should be ashamed of themselves.
zizban
10:24 AM, by
I have a LIDE 50, and I got it to install okay, but if another user with a lower userid is logged in, I cannot access the scanner.
I didn't think it was too much trouble to install - although I think I had to download an updated driver because I was using Panther, and the driver only worked in Jaguar.
10:42 PM, by
I would agree, My Lide 30 was a complete pain, but then I found SANE, scanners are now easy, and it is great.
And it works a treat with Tiger.
4:19 PM, by
Funny, I have that exact scanner and haven't had a single problem with it under OS X, using the official Canon driver.. Just make sure that it's turned on when you're installing the driver and that it's not connected to a non powered USB-hub since it needs the whole power delivery from a USB-port (0,5W or whatever it is).
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