Leopard 10.5.1 Appears to have Broken My Epson Scanner

In one of my early Leopard posts I was happy to report that my Epson scanner was working perfectly. However, yesterday when I went to scan it wouldn’t work. It kept telling me there was an error communicating with the scanner. I checked the connections and all seemed normal. The only real change there has been on the system since the last time the scanner was used was the update to 10.5.1. I can only conclude that that’s what broke it.

Regardless of who is to blame I did eventually find a solution. First, go to the Epson site and download and install the latest drivers for your scanner, the description should explicitly say that it supports Leopard. Then reboot. It doesn’t tell you to but I couldn’t get the scanner back into life without a reboot. At this stage I found that the Epson Scan utility wouldn’t even launch. However, the TWAIN drivers themselves do work so you can scan using Preview.app. I’d never used Preview to scan before and I have to say I’m impressed with the interface. You can scan from within Preview by going to File -> Import Image ....

I have to say I’m a little disappointed with Apple over this, 10.5.1 was supposed to fix things, not break them!

[tags]Hardware, Scanner, Apple, OS X, Leopard, Epson[/tags]