As we all know, I have gradually moved lots of things I do from Windows to Linux over time, but still have a computer running the Home edition of Windows 10. One of the few things that still runs on Windows 10 is my Epson Perfection V200 Photo scanner. Well it did work well on Windows 10 until the recent update, and now as it turns out, lots of Epson scanner owners are finding they are having scanning software problems on Windows 10.
Although I was able to get my scanning done eventually with a lot of mucking around, I have decided not unnaturally that maybe it is time to take a look at scanning on Linux. The last time I looked at this was over a year ago, and at the time, the options didn't look very attractive.
This time around I decided I would take a look at a shareware package called VueScan, which is cross platform, being produced for Windows, macOS and Linux. It was easy to install the basic package on Linux. It has then told me I needed a driver, and provided a link to the Epson website. Much to my surprise I found a deb package available to be downloaded for Debian/Ubuntu 64-bit.
I then found that SANE needed to be installed so I looked up the Debian scanning page and ran the tests on it, which mostly seemed to work (scanimage -L didn't seem to work however). I then ran the install.sh script to install the Epson .deb package, which seemed to install OK.
After turning the scanner on and off again, I found that ImageScan (the Epson software package) and VueScan both came up and detected the scanner OK.
I have tested so far with ImageScan but not yet VueScan. Both seem to be able to acknowledge the scanner's film and print scanning capabilities, but so far I have not tested this out. A basic document scan with ImageScan worked well.
This should work out a lot more conveniently but I do remain concerned about being dependent on Epson producing and updating its drivers for this scanner in the future, because I imagine eventually they will stop supporting it. The joys of owning hardware. At least with the printer the HP PCL print language is so widely supported with even very ancient printers able to continue to be used forever.
