Canon CanoScan N1240U

The CanoScan N1240U is a good-quality slimline colour A4 flatbed scanner from Canon. It supports resolutions up to 2400dpi, but does not have a film adapter.

Windows Support
The scanner comes with drivers for Windows up to ME and 2000. XP drivers can be downloaded from Canon's website.

I am currently having a problem with the latest drivers in that the Toolbox 4.0 application will not work with the 7.x drivers, complaining that it cannot connect to the TWAIN driver. The driver will however work quite happily with TWAIN application such as Adobe Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro! This I am told relates to my using NTFS for the Windows partition. The only solution I have for now is to stick to Toolbox 3.1 and the 6.2 driver. I will keep you posted with any developments.

Linux Support
Canon currently do not support Linux, however in a recent email response from them, I can confirm that they do plan to support Linux in the future, and may eventually produce Open Source drivers, which is great news. They claim that Linux did not support USB until recently...

Just to prove them wrong, there is now an open source driver for the N1240U which is part of the Plustek Scanner Driver which is intended for use with SANE. I tried an early version of this driver and managed to achieve a halfway decent scan. Since then some more work has gone into the scanner calibration, so the results should be even better.

Also, Hamrick Software produce a product called VueScan, a handy piece of software which works with many different scanners, including the N1240U. It differs from the above driver in that it is a standalone piece of software, with no integration with the Gimp or other Linux apps, but it does provide some pretty powerful image processing options of its own, specifically for scanned imaged. It easy to setup (just add options scanner vendor=0x04a9 product=0x220e to /etc/modules.conf) and run vuescan and everything should work. The Linux version of VueScan is free for non-commercial use, but at USD 60 for the Standard Edition and USD 80 for the Professional Edition, it is hardly going to break the bank even if you do have to pay for it and there is even a Windows version too!