Casualty of XP. (Agfa Snapscan 1212p)

Member Name: Asylum

Product:	Agfa Snapscan 1212p
Date:	13/01/02 (3052 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: budget priced, good quality, ease of use

Disadvantages: not XP compatable

I bought my Snapscan 1212p several years ago as a purely non essential piece of equipment which I simply wanted as a toy. However, as time went on and I found more uses for it, it has become an absolute necessity in many ways. During the month of December I must have used it virtually every day as I was making Christmas cards for friends with personal photos inserted.
The great advantages of this scanner are the ease of use and the good quality of reproduction despite it being a budget priced item. A good photo can easily be expanded to A4 without any serious loss of quality.
However, as with most parallel scanners it has become a casualty of Windows XP. The parallel port was very popular due to the transfer speed of 1 Megabite per second, so it was the obvious choice for scanners. The process was to daisy chain the scanner along with the printer and load the drivers which emulated a SCSI port and enabled the operation. However, these drivers were specifically designed to work with the 9X versions of WIndows (95/98/Me) and will not operate under Windows NT. Windows XP, whether it be the Professional or the Home version, are both upgrades of Windows 2000 and thus based on the NT core. Result: parallel scanners do not operate with Windows XP.
Sadly, due to the fact that USB has been around for a while and offers the same transfer speeds as parallel, most scanners have been USB recently and most manufacturers do not support parallel scanners beyond a certain date. I am now considering the purchase of a USB scanner in order to be able to run Windows XP, so if you are considering the purchase of a scanner then do not buy parallel without first checking the manufacturers website for compatability with current and future operating systems.

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