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  A scanner miracle!Dec 20, 2018 11:39 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Spent a few hours fighting with the scanner tonight, as it started jamming mid-scan again (or reporting a data error, specifically); all seemed lost, I spent a while more researching available large-format (A3) scanners, made one last despairing attempt to get a full-resolution scan (had managed a 100 dpi scan earlier; I usually scan at 600 dpi), made another...and somehow it worked.
 
Less sure now that temperature has anything to do with it as the room temp was pretty stable for that whole period, more or less. Maybe humidity (it has been super wet and rainy here lately—blasting the heater for a while as I was could have dropped the humidity a good deal over the course of the evening)...but maybe more likely the power supply; the one it came with died long ago with no official replacement available, then an old RadioShack one I finagled into working with it stopped working (the plug was always finicky), so I've been using a newer third-party one for some time now—but I have the scanner up high, and the power cord with its attached "brick" power supply was sort of pulling down on the power jack in the scanner a little, I think, and possibly that was leading to power fluctuations; I've lifted the brick up, and now the scanner is working flawlessly, so... Well, we'll see how long it lasts. : o
 
(Another thing supporting the theory of it being some sort of power issue is that I've had to go and unplug and replug the data and power cords in a particular order each day for the past few days before the scanner would be recognized by my laptop, and as far as I know that would probably be due to there having been a power interruption in the mean time. Of course, all of this may point to the scanner's power jack having been so weakened by drag from the power cord over the past months that it is simply no longer reliable. : /)
 
One plus is that in the course of my despairing research, I finally found that Mustek is back selling their relatively low-priced large-format flatbed scanners in the USA again! Yay! So I could get a shiny new one and not completely break the bank, if necessary. First I would try cracking this one open and lubricating the scanner head track...but we'll hope it doesn't come to that. : o But if it works okay tomorrow, I'll give it another test as soon as I get back post-X-Mas, and if it runs into trouble I'll take some of that break time to try lubing it up, and then ordering a new one if that doesn't work. So potentially I could be without a working scanner for the first few days of the new year and might have to extend my holiday break beyond the 2nd—but that's the worst-case scenario. : P
 
 
 
 
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