UMAX Scanner - and Photoshop Imports

[Ed Hennessey]

This scanner is a POS. My user has a UMAX Astra2400S scsi scanner.
For one thing we had to BUY$$$ drivers for it when we upgraded the
machine to W2K. That got me going to begin with - well with that all
done - here is the problem

When the user opens photoshop and tries to import a scan - she gets an
error "Memory Allocation Error". I found the readme file that said
sometimes the program hozes up and to edit some variable in the
vistascn.ini (or something like that) from a 1 to a 0. Which I did -
still no luck.

Have any of you ever seen this error? Know how to correct it? She
has W2K, Dell GX400 and has 384M memory.

 

[Bob Shomler]

This scanner is a POS. My user has a UMAX Astra2400S scsi scanner.
For one thing we had to BUY$$$ drivers for it when we upgraded the
machine to W2K. That got me going to begin with - well with that all
done - here is the problem

When the user opens photoshop and tries to import a scan - she gets an
error "Memory Allocation Error". I found the readme file that said
sometimes the program hozes up and to edit some variable in the
vistascn.ini (or something like that) from a 1 to a 0. Which I did -
still no luck.

Have any of you ever seen this error? Know how to correct it? She
has W2K, Dell GX400 and has 384M memory.

This may be a common problem; in January it was mentioned in a thread
"Photoshop Acquisition Module Faults on Scan from Flatbed" in the
<comp.graphics.apps.photoshop> news group. In my experience with a UMAX
S6E (PS/CS and XP) it seems to occur on larger scans or multiple scans:
sometimes first scan works and second one fails. I have 1.5G RAM and PS
gets 70 percent of that, so amount of RAM does not seem to be the
problem. Perhaps older (SCSI?) UMAX TWAIN drivers do not work with PS
in W2K and XP's dynamic memory management for passing scanned data file
to PS. I use workaround of starting scan driver (MagicScan) in
standalone mode, scan to tiff file then open the tiff in PS.

Bob Shomler
www.shomler.com

 

[Chris Cox]

Unfortunately, it is a bug in the UMAX scanner driver.

The only way to fix it would be to get UMAX to update the driver.

But one way to work around it would be to use VueScan by Ed Hammrick.

Chris