Scanner is an unavoidable hardware device in your daily computing life. It helps you to digitize photos, documents and other valuables within minutes. Imagine, you purchased a scanner in 2003 but the vendor has stopped production of both the device and the supported scan software. You cannot simply throw away the scanner and purchase a new device just because of the fact that the driver software is unavailable.
You should find out alternate ways such as the usage of third party Windows based softwares such as VueScan developed by Hamrick Software, with which you can effectively make use of the any scanner irrespective of when the scanner was introduced into the market.
According to Ed Hamrick of Hamrick Software, VueScan is an easy to use replacement for the software that came with your scanner and supports most flatbed scanners, All in One Printers and film scanners.
A core feature of VueScan 9 is its ability to work with any scanner, be it old or new. Moreover, you can also use it as replacement software for the default software which came with the scanner and in case if the scanner vendor no longer supports the device you purchased.
VueScan 9 provides an ability to easily scan photos and documents in a wide range of formats and is compatible with over 1850 different scanners. Moreover, the software works on multiple operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux including the upcoming Windows 8.
It also provides support for older scanners that don’t work on newer operating systems, including most Canon LiDE, Epson Perfection, Nikon CoolScan and HP OfficeJet scanners. An interesting feature of the software is the availability of VueScan Mobile from the Apple store, which can be used with iPad or iPhone.
A fully functional 30 day trial version of VueScan 9 is available for download using which you can test drive the functions and features included with the software by performing a trial scan. However, you cannot utilize the software for scanning real documents because of the watermark which will be automatically placed on the output, which will be removed upon purchase of the software.
The default scan output format of VueScan is JPEG but you can select PDF and TIFF from the Output tab. Moreover, it can also recognize text using OCR and create multi-page PDFs using both flatbed scanners and scanners with automatic document feeders.
In order to work with VueScan, you just need to start your scanner (in my case it’s Canon MP 145) and double click the icon titled VueScan from the desktop.
VueScan 9 Professional Edition
As you can see from the above figure, you need to click Scan button to start scanning your document or photo. Alternatively, you can crop, filter and colorize the output by selecting the relevant options from the respective tabs.
I noticed that VueScan 9 ships with a fast engine and all my documents are scanned very fast by preserving the originality. As I mentioned above, you can save the scanned material in PDF format by selecting the relevant option from the figure given below
Save in PDF with VueScan 9
I played with VueScan 9 for a week by testing various options and I must say that no help or assistance is required to work with the software. However, the developer, Ed Hamrick, has included an easy to understandable guide which I hope will surely help beginners a lot.
I highly recommend VueScan 9 Professional Edition for all avid computer users who want to make productive use of their scanning device.
