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For a project, I purchased a Brother MFC-3240C all-in-one since it was “TWAIN complaint”. Little did I know that being “TWAIN compliant” means absolutely nothing since to be “compliant” you do not have to implement most capabilities such as being able to control color depth, resolution, etc. For my project, I must have 300×300 1-bit color, but I cann control this via the TWAIN Driver so I end up with unusable image files that have too high a resolution and too much color depth.
What kind of “standard” does require implementers to follow the “standard”? What a waste. TWAIN should at least require the manufacturers to publish which capabilities their dirvers support so that we don’t have to purchase the equipment just to find out what it’s driver’s capabilities are.
This is exactly why I rely on Microsoft whenever possible for “standards”. Corporations are far more effective at implementing usable “standards” than are committees that live in fear of offending a member.
TWAIN is dead. Long live WIA. 🙁
Maybe you are not right. WIA TWAIN drivers have limited TWAIN capabilities. You better watch for products with full TWAIN drivers.
BTW also in printer drivers you find differnt qualities of drivers depending on the vendor and this standard is defined by MS.
Best regards,
Kaij
I’m not so sure ‘twain is dead’ is acuate. sounds like your impression of a brother all-in-one twain was less than desired, but i have to agree that its a somewhat frustrating ‘standard’. It’s be nice is putting ‘Twain’ on you product meant more than it seems to, but i still wouln’t say dead. weak maybe, but there are vendors that implement it well and those that implement it less well. And i like the look of WIA automation 2, but it doesn’t seem to offer the same level of control.
gabe
Well, TWAIN enforcement certainly is sad – er, it would be if it existed. But the problem with the Brother MFC’s isn’t a TWAIN enforcement problem *exactly* – The Brother MFC’s don’t have native TWAIN drivers, they only have WIA drivers, so when you use them through TWAIN you are actually going through the Microsoft-written WIA-TWAIN driver, and then through a Brother WIA driver.
The Microsoft WIA-TWAIN driver is a nice-looking piece of crap (NLPOC), written by people who didn’t have time to do a good job, if they had cared about document scanning, which they didn’t. I’m sure the idea was to make companies (like Brother) believe that if they just wrote a WIA driver, they could skip writing a TWAIN driver. WIA spreads, TWAIN dies… sounds good, ship it! Even Microsoft’s MODI people recommend avoiding WIA-TWAIN and using native TWAIN drivers: These problems are not a secret, Microsoft just cares less than zero about fixing them.
We’ve seen problems with every ADF scanner we’ve ever tried to control through the WIA path, not just the Brother MFCs. You get only one page out of each document. I asked Brother about this, but once they understood the problem, they quit answering my e-mails. Solution: Don’t use Brother MFC’s through TWAIN, be skeptical of any ADF scanner using the WIA-TWAIN driver, and be cautious about controlling any MFD through TWAIN.
I recently had to deal with both(WIA and TWAIN), and I do think that the fact that twain says what is mandatory for a driver to be compliant is a lot better than WIA that does not says about anything to be mandatory.It just so happend that in twain I could use an HP scanner and in WIA I could not, simply because WIA does not care to make mandatory something a lot more critical than color depth and resolution: the page format. Simply put, I could not set programatically the format of the page to be scanned, and as a result the european A4 format was simply chopped to the american “letter”, wich rendered my software and one month’s work useless.:evil:
Oh, and another thing: TWAIN is actually a consortium of important scanner producers who obviously do not wish their scanners to become NOT TWAIN compatible, or to have to spend a few millions on updating their scanner drivers with zero profit, so it is a miracle that twain even has mandatory functionality that must be implemented. So TWAIN Is better than WIA. One more funny thing about WIA: the Interface lets you belive that ADF scanning is by default both-sided. Single sided ADF is designed as an “Avanced Feature”. 🙁