RE: filmscanners: Need feedback on VueScan Idea

["Austin Franklin" <austin@darkroom.com>]

> > >It would help my workflow considerably if I could answer email or write
> > invoices or whatever, rather than having to babysit the scanner for each
> > frame.
> >
> > It would help everybody's, I'm sure. The solution is
> co-processors, which is
>
> Actually the solution is not co-processors.

Most scanners do hog the system quite a bit.  The issue is both hardware and
software from what I can tell.  The issue is the data is sent as it is
scanned, and as such, there is a real time requirement on the software to
take the data as it arrives.  Polling is typically faster than interrupts in
this case, and as such, the system is bogged down in a loop checking for
data...

A solution would be either a SCSI controller or scanner with some large
amount of memory, and you only transfer data when you have a lot to
transfer, and make it interrupt driven, instead of polled.  You don't need
the entire image at once, but possibly two 4M buffers that get ping-pong'd
or something like that would certainly aid the situation.  A caching
controller could be made to accommodate this, but I doubt they currently
will handle it the way one would want it to for a scanner.