I have an Epson Perfection V500 scanner. It works fine with xsane however only scanning at 8 bit color depth. The scanner is capable of 16 bit color depth (48 bit total). I have installed the Avasys drivers as per all the net wisdom I found.
The scanner is working but the scanning choice shows "full color" and nothing giving a choice of color depth. I am trying to archive some old photos and would like to scan at a greater color depth than 8 bits per channel. (On another subject I would like to find a way to crop tiffs saved as 16 bits per color. If anyone knows of a Linux tool to do this an off-list e-mail would be most appreciated.) I had an older HP Scanjet connected to a previous version of Ubuntu and with that Xsane gave me a choice of color depth. So I know that there must be something telling Xsane about scanner capabilities. I have spent quite a bit of time with Google searches and haven't figured out what informs xsane of the scanner color depth ability nor how to get this scanner working at more than 8 bits per color. If it is possible I would appreciate some suggestions. The HP scanner was troublesome but I did get a scan at higher color depth with xsane so I know it is possible. I am currently using this with Ubuntu 11.04. Thanks.