No. 26, Scanner Trouble

Mountain Lion Can Be Dangerous!

I am a long-time Mac user, and I felt I had gone too long without upgrading my operating system.  Last month I was still on plain Leopard, which was three upgrades behind.  Software was beginning to appear on the market that would not run on Leopard, so I had to first move up to Snow Leopard before I could move on to anything else.  But then I was able to leap over Lion to the current system, Mountain Lion.  Up to date once again, I could breathe a sigh of relief, until...

Until I attempted to scan a drawing.  First it crashed Photoshop, repeatedly.  Photoshop CS4 is what I have always used to import images from my scanner, a Mustek large-format flatbedl, the model A3 USB 1200 Pro.  I recently wrote glowingly about this scanner in my post Drawings Into Digital: Part 1--Scanning.  That was in early November of last year.

A paperless drawing.  Yes, I can do them, but I still want my scanner back!

Now I am out on a limb.  It turns out that Mustek does not have drivers for their scanners which work on OS 10.7 (Lion) or 10.8 (Mountain Lion).  For me, this is bad news.  My Epson Stylus CX5000 all-in-one (scanner, printer, copier) also will not work in scanning mode, but I could replace it for about US$80.  I can't replace my Mustek large format scanner so easily, and it is very important to my work.  As an animator who works on standard animation paper, which is 10 1/2" x 12 1/2", I have to have a large format scanner to get my hundreds--sometimes thousands--of drawings into the computer efficiently and in correct register.

My hope is that Mustek will soon provide the needed drivers, and I will be back in business.  My hope is that it is fair to say that they do not yet have the drivers--but that they soon will.

Anyway, for now I hope other Mac users who depend on their scanners will be alerted to this problem.  I will be posting some warnings on Linked In animation group sites also.