Scanning software prevents scanners going to landfill

VueScan, a firm claiming to offer the world’s most widely used scanning software, says it has prevented over 412,500 scanners from going to landfill sites around the world.

The Florida-based company supports over 3000 scanners from 35 manufacturers in a combination of 3 operating systems – Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Although VueScan offers a range of advanced features for document, film and photo scanning, many customers purchase VueScan so they can continue to use their existing scanner.

It has been a common practice for many years for scanner manufacturers to stop supporting scanners when a new operating system is announced, the latest driver is not released and the only way for the scanner to continue to work is to use alternative software.

Ed Hamrick, the President of Hamrick Software, says: “We create scanner drivers for old scanners so our customers can keep using the scanner they already have. Compared to other devices, many types of scanners have not seen so many technological advances, and we know that people are loath to discard it when there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. We are proud of the fact that VueScan is making a positive difference to our environment, and we know from the emails we receive that many people are delighted to be able to keep something perfectly usable.”

VueScan is free to download and test for an unlimited time period.

Ed Hamrick says: “We really want people to fully test VueScan before purchase. That way they know it works with their scanner, and they can see what a difference it can make to their productivity and scan quality. It also means that we have a constant base of testers – so it ensures that VueScan remains at an incredibly high technical level.”

He adds: “We work with many of the scanner manufacturers, they provide us with technical information so we can support their scanners and VueScan is regularly recommended in user technical discussions. It would be great to work with them more on how we can make a bigger difference to the environment.”

VueScan is targeted for all levels of users and has 3 modes to work in – Basic, Standard and Professional. It offers an easy to use one-stop ‘Scan’ button which will scan with all the settings done automatically.

A fully functional, trial copy of VueScan can be downloaded from: http://www.hamrick.com/.