I've had the Photosmart working with Sane and PMSane without any
problems. The major inconvenience is that the level of control of the
Photosmart scanner offered by Sane 0.74 is much less than that offered
by the latest version of Sane. Unfortunately, the latest version (the
OS/2 port of....) has a bug with regards to Photosmart support so you
can't use it, though I believe that efforts are underway to fix this. I
formerly used Sane exclusively with PMsane or the scanning tool that
comes with Phototiger, but then it occured to me that as far as scanning
film was concerned, the areas to be scanned were very predictable. Scan
the first, second, third etc image on the strip, or just scan the whole
strip for preview purposes.. It turned out to be very easy to write a
CMD file that would call Sane, along with the appropriate command line
params, to scan the deisred image, and, once the scan was complete,
display the image using PMView and do all cropping etc with that
package.. The latter conveniently has a command line switch that allows
you to display the image in negative. A high res. full-colour file
produced by a scanning an entire image is big (about 60Mb), but it can
easily cut down using PMView. The main reason for adopting the CMD file
approach was that I was having problems accessing the Photosmart scanner
from PMSane when another scanner that was on the SCSI bus was switched
on, and calling PMView directly made it easier to preview the film
strips. You can call PMview from PMSane, but then you have the problem
of selecting the area you wich to scan subsequently.
all the best,
Jeremy Harbinson