Mitch Wiedemann wrote: i bought this baby - (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00000J3FV/104-4316108-0041...) 3 years ago for $99 CAN - and i over the years have tested it in each new version of whatever flavour distro i had installed at the time. I never had any luck getting a good quality scan (or so i thought ...) this week i plugged it in again with fedora and fired up xsane - ran a scan at 300dpi and got the same crappy quality image that i had always got. Then a flash came to me - instead of just looking at the 'preview' that xsane was showing me - i thought i would fire up gimp and check it out. Lo and behold - the quality was incredible - it was perfectly scanned and the resolution was great!! My problem was that the 'preview' in xsane was displaying my image 'compressed' so that i could see it all at the same time on my screen. This caused the quality to look really crappy and thus my assumption that my scanner was not supported. Anyhoo - after all that - i heartily recommend this cheapo scanner for great quality scans that works out-of-the-box with fedora. if you want a sample of what it can do - email me directly and i will attach some demo scans for you to check out the quality ... pantz -- Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes ... That way when you do criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes!

Mitch Wiedemann wrote: Epson Perfection 1260 (with or without the slide adaptor, which is just a box that sits on top of the scanner glass when you scan slides). The scanner was plug-and-play, none of Epson's software and no non-free software drivers are needed. Simply plug in the power, the USB cable, and run xsane or the GIMP (of course, you'll want the xsane-gimp package installed to use the scanner from within the GIMP). A new Epson Perfection 1260 scanner should cost you around US$70 mail-order online (more in stores). A used refurbished one goes for about US$30. The 35mm slide adapter unit costs about US$40. Check http://www.pricewatch.com/ and http://froogle.google.com/ for prices and online stores. The only catch is to make sure you have version 1.0.10 or greater of the sane and version 0.45-5 or higher of the sane-backends. This is not a problem for FC1, as FC1 ships with a more recent version of all the necessary software. But it was an issue for RH9 and earlier users. See http://www.gjaeger.de/scanner/plustek.html#epson for more information. I mention this in case you upgraded from RH8 or RH9 and somehow did not upgrade the sane software packages. Happy scanning.