Hi all intrepid WAMUGgers
I thought I'd share this with you in case someone ventures down the
same path, although I suspect I'm following someone else's trail
anyway.
My lovely wife went out to Toyworld here in sunny Gero last Saturday
and came back with a a brand new Epson RX510 multifunction
printer/scanner device beastie, almost as big as our trusty Ruby
iMac it now sits beside! "Just 'cos", as the kids say.
Harvey Norman's 18 month interest free plans have caused this
household situation before, but now I know what we'll be doing over
the Christmas holidays - scanning 1000s of slides and negatives.
See http://www.epson.com.au/products/multifunctional/photorx510.asp
So a quiet weekend gardening, levelling student outcomes and sorting
out our tax papers became one of unpacking and setting up this beast
to run on 10.3.9 (Ruby) and 10.4.3 (PowerBook).
Some 10 hours later, over 2 days, I finally got what it appears to
be its main software driving force, the "Smart Panel" software, to
run without crashing and locking the scanner option mid scan. That
was about 10 pm last night and I'm loath to fire it all up again now
to see if it's still functioning.
You see, after installing the myriad nice programs on the two Macs
from the installer disks, the "Smart Panel" proves to be quite dumb.
What should be a nice interface bringing all the scan and photo
programs together, consistently crashed mid scan, particularly when
doing multiple slide scans on Ruby, and it simply wouldn't open on
the PowerBook.
Aha, a quick websearch shows some updates on Epson's Australian
website so bug patches are downloaded and installed. Still it
crashes. Maybe there's not enough memory. On Ruby maybe, with 356 MB
ram but not surely on the Powerbook with 1 GB!
See here
http://tech.epson.com.au/downloads/product.asp?id=photorx510 and
here http://www.newsoftinc.com/tech-Support/show-Patch.asp?uid=202
for updates to Version 3.10E Smart Panel
On Versiontracker and other websites, reviewers describe this
software and updates variously as "crippleware", "not a useful
product feature", "getting really pissed off now", "can't they
(Epson) ever do anything right", and "Why must I pay £3.99 for a
software update that should come with the product!" Indeed!
Aha, so what am I to do. It's Sunday now and I'm not going to let
this b***** beast get the better of me.
I find an update to V3.14 but it's no better. Then an update to
v3.15p01from 3.15, which incidentally won't open as Stuffit tells me
its "...an unsupported archive version".
So where's the missing link, v 3.15? About 8 pm last night I
discovered this:
http://uk.newsoft.eu.com/products/product-main.asp?
productid=UK0018&productmenus=250&submenus=856
The missing link.
Now I've parted company with £3.99 GBP - note above comment about
paying, but I decide, stuff it, if it works, it's worth it NOW!!,
bugger the cost - and downloaded a 51.4 Mb Smart Panel v3.15,
deleted all reference that I can think of to previous Smart Panels,
preferences, etc, said many choice words about Epson (not my lovely
wife of course who's since long gone to beddibyes), installed it on
Ruby and Powerbook, and guess what? It worked.
Ask me tomorrow. Maybe it's still flaky.
So tell me, why should I need to pay for software updates to get the
machine working properly anyway? I shouldn't.
Should I tell Epson? Probably.
Why isn't this available on their Australian website? Who knows?
Should I tell the Harvey Norman guy who sold it to us? Probably. In
fact I think I might even burn the download to disk and give it to
him, just in case some other poor soul stumbles through the door up
here and wants to buy a RX510 to run on Mac OS X.
Interestingly there were a lot of patches for Windows versions too,
so maybe Smart Panel is really, really Dumb?
Thanks for reading.
Regards
Reg
PS
If you need a copy of this software, let me know off list. We'll
come to some arrangement. I'm sure Epson won't mind. Grrr.