Using an HP ScanJet 4200C with Mac OS X?

[Lyle]

A long shot, I know, but does anyone know of a way to use an HP ScanJet 4200C scanner with Mac OS X? I inherited this old scanner and figured that if I could get it to work, hey, free scanner. Frantic Googling is not turning up any useful advice but I thought I'd ask here as well to see if there are any tricks...

 

[doucy2]

did you check HP's wesite for drivers for it
i know that where i got my driver for my hp scanner on my mac

 

[Sun Baked]

Not supported by ....

http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/vuescan.htm#hp

Not supported by ...

http://www.silverfast.com/product/HP/en.html

That will basically make any support at all hard to find, unless you want to give it to someone with a PC.

 

[Lyle]

Not supported by ....

http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/vuescan.htm#hp

Not supported by ...

http://www.silverfast.com/product/HP/en.html

That will basically make any support at all hard to find, unless you want to give it to someone with a PC.

Yeah, that's what I figured. We do have an old Windows PC that I feel sure it will work with. Just wanted to see if there's any hope of getting the Mac to recognize it. Thanks for the feedback.

 

[Jo-Kun]

I used to have one of those with my PC... its basically a Parrallel port scanner with a convertor to USB... and that's the reason why it will never work on a mac... its a faked USB

 

[Lyle]

I used to have one of those with my PC... its basically a Parrallel port scanner with a convertor to USB... and that's the reason why it will never work on a mac... its a faked USB

Ah, OK. I was a little curious as to the technical reason(s) why no one's found a way to make it work with a Mac. After all, even though the manufacturer said it's for Windows only, the scanner doesn't know that.

 

[Stefano F.]

I used to have one of those with my PC... its basically a Parrallel port scanner with a convertor to USB... and that's the reason why it will never work on a mac... its a faked USB

Basically, this is BS.

1st - it works with OS9 and Windows through its USB-interface, not parallel; which it actually doesn't have.

2nd - it works with the SANE-library under Ubuntu through its USB-interface.

Now, OSX is very much UNIX, so there shouild be a software solution to the problem. Is there a sane front-end for OSX? Then we should be in business.

 

[Lyle]

I'm wondering... since 2005 things have probably progressed well enough to give a concrete answer to this thread

Yes, well, in the three years since I started this thread I finally broke down and bought a scanner that works just fine with OS X.

 

[hwojtek]

What did you buy? I gave up hoping HP would be kind enough to develop a Leopard-compatible, Universal Binary driver for my Scanjet 4600...

 

[Lyle]

What did you buy? I gave up hoping HP would be kind enough to develop a Leopard-compatible, Universal Binary driver for my Scanjet 4600...

I got an Epson Perfection (sic) V200. It's not great, but it works fine for what I needed.

 

[mb21]

Got it working!

I've got an old ScanJet 4200C and got it working on my Mac, even on Lion!

Check out this live-saving blog post:

HP ScanJet on Mac OS X (or any scanner, for that matter)

It uses some open source packages. Just follow the instructions and I had to do a restart afterwards..

 

[LipmonLM]

VueScan

I've found that VueScan is worth the money to use my non-OS X supported scanners.

 

[Wolffie]

Buffy the Vampire thread slayer

Ahhhhhhh! Every three years the thread returns from the dead!
Kinda like the summer cicadas, every seven years.