VueScan reverse engineered over 6,000 scanner drivers to bring compatibility to macOS Catalina
Nov 7, 2019
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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macOS Catalina killed support for 32-Bit applications. This includes many (still) popular applications like Aperture and iPhoto, but also a lot of hardware for which no 64-Bit drivers exist. Including scanners. The two applications I mentioned have been saved, but now thanks to the folks at VueScan, so have thousands of scanners after they reverse-engineered the drivers.
The update to 64-bit with Catalina meant that a lot of scanner owners lost native support for their devices, including many very popular models still in common use today, particularly slide and negative scanners. This forces them to upgrade to newer hardware that isn’t necessarily as good for their needs or to keep a second computer around for compatibility.
This week, though, VueScan released a new version 9.7, which runs find under Catalina, and offers support for thousands of older scanners from 42 manufacturers by reverse-engineering the drivers. You can see a complete list of scanners here, but manufacturers include Nikon, Canon, Epson, Pentax, Kodak, Fujitsu, and many more. VueScan provides support for around 2,400 scanner models on Windows, 2,100 on Mac and 1,900 on Linux.
VueScan is available for $49.95 for the standard version and $99.95 for the professional edition. And you’ll need the professional edition if you want to scan film. See here for a list of differences between the two versions.
[via DPReview]
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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4 responses to “VueScan reverse engineered over 6,000 scanner drivers to bring compatibility to macOS Catalina”
I used from the beginning
Wow… regressing 30 years is now considered progress?
Yeah, I used this software 30 years ago. I also wrote printer drivers to allow PC printers to work on Macs in the 1980’s (state-of-the-art at the time)
I never used buggy whips though. When things are past their usefulness, it is time to put them in a museum and admire them for how well they fit their time, but not anymore…
“Just because something’s old doesn’t mean you throw it away.”
Nobody said this was progress, they’re saying that it was making good scanners that are still capable of producing good results useful again instead of being consigned to a landfill.
My old scanner is in the list: