Hi, > After several days of working on this problem, it seems obvious > that the sane package will not support the transparency unit on the > Epson 2480.
well, it does, at least for some versions of the 2480. Some people have reported problems similar to yours (see, e.g. http://alioth.debian.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=301010&group_id=30186&atid=410366 ). For others, the scanner seems to work perfectly (mostly using sane-backends 1.0.15). I have no clue why this problem occurs for some users and not for others. As far as I know there is no correspondence to any version of the backend. In fact the code for scanning transparencies has hardly been changed in the last three years. I doubt that an earlier version of the backend will solve your problem. > After working for two days with the latest > sane-backends package (1.0.16) and having more problems than with > the older version, I have dropped back down to 1.0.15. This has > not solved my problems with the color banding on slide scans, but > at least it works again for flatbed sources. As I explained in another mail the reduced scanning area in transparency mode is a security measure for 2580 users. > Now I just have to > decide whether to buy a machine to use as a dedicated scan server > (Windows... Yecchhh) or buy a film scanner that is known to work on > Linux (lots of money). There is always a third possibility: Fix the problem. /Oliver