A large box arrived for me at work yesterday, unexpectedly. It contained a Mustek A3 USB scanner. Some months ago we were looking at 11×17 inch (A3) scanners. There were a couple in the $1000 price range, a bunch of more expensive ones, and one outlier, the $180 Mustek scanner. I have lots of 11×14 prints in boxes from my days as a press photgrapher.
Checking the opinion boards, it turns out that the Mustek provides surprisng quality for such an inexpensive product, It’s main drawbacks are speed (it’s USB 1.1) and the lack of drivers for Mac OS X. It’s also one of the few products that VueScan, that venerable Swiss army knife of scanner software does not support. I ordered it, figuring I could wire it up to the Windows XP partition on my (normally Linux-running) AMD-64 box, and promptly forgot about it.
It took the vendor months to deliver (back ordered?) so I managed to surprise myself (which I suspect will get a lot more common the older I get). Spouse Linda was hosting a luncheon for bride-to-be Anne Peterson, so I spent a little time fussing with the Mustek.
Looking at the AMD box, I realized it’s been so long since I’ve booted it into Windows, that somehow the Windows XP partition had disappeared. Oops. Got SuSE and Fedora Core, but no Windows. Then I considered putting Windows on our Intel Mac Mini via Boot Camp, but realized that there was some risk of the elderly Mustek Windows scanner driver balking on the Mac’s latest generation hardware. So no Windows running anywhere, and no OS X driver for the scanner. Hmmm.
Mustek’s web site doesn’t mention it, but the box says ‘Supports Mac OS 8 and 9.’ I wondered if my old and long-running G4 Cube might still have a Mac OS 9 ‘Classic’ partition. After a little archeology, it turned out it did, and the Mustek Mac installer, while a bit peculiar got the job done. Along the way I was greatly amused by the rather dated feel of Mac OS 9. The Mustek plug-in, for a product called Color-It, is downright quaint: it forgets all your settings between scans, and it and the scanner are not fast.
However, I did manage to scan about 12 prints in the space of an hour, from one of many boxes in the garage. And the quality is actually decent – the scanner is 300×600 dpi native, which works fine with the large prints, and I don’t think the prints have much more dynamic range than the scanner. The scan at the top of this post is from an 11×14 print made from a 4×5-inch negative, taken in East Los Angeles in the 70s. So we can now slowly add to the Photo Archive…
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