Today I’m going to introduce a way how to connect a image capture device, which is not natively supported by OS X, to your mac.

The Problem: I wanted to connect a rather old scanner – a HP Scanjet 3300C to my Macbook Pro. However HP doesnot deliver any current drivers to connect it to my mac.

The solution is an open source interface called sane which delivers connectivity to many many image capturing devices and also enables Linux to capture images from your digital camera or scanner. Basically the sane interface sits between your operating system and your connected hardware as a driver. The sane frontend connects sane and your operating system. The backend connects between sane and your hardware. This is a very convenient solution to save development time and money as you only have to establish a connection to sane once.

In my case I needed the appropriate files for OS X and installed 1. the libusb package followed by 2. the sane-backends package. And finally 3. I installed the TWAIN-SANE-Interface.
There is also an option, to install a preference pane in your system configuration, where you can select your image capturing device and do more configuration tasks.
There is also a a backend available for the HP 3300c, but for me the above steps were sufficient.

In Photoshop you will find a new device under the import section called sane. The features you will find here can not compare to the Windows 98 Driver, however you can select the disired resolution and use your hardware. Otherwise I would have needed to invest in a new scanner, which I did not want to.

There is a wide variety of image devices available. Maybe yours is among them.

Go Sane and have a nice scan!