Specifications

host PC. The IEEE-1394 (i.Link) interface is now available on high-performance scanners from Epson,
UMAX, and others, enabling large amounts of scanned data to be transported to the computer from
the scanner.
To use an IEEE-1394 scanner with a system, you must have the following:
■ IEEE-1394 port installed in your computer. These cards are PCI-based and typically contain three or
more ports; a few computers have built-in IEEE-1394 ports.
■ Compatible operating system software (Windows 98/Me/2000) and drivers
You can find a list of IEEE-1394-interface scanners at the AllFireWire.com Web site:
www.
allfirewire.com.
TWAIN
Regardless of which interface you choose for the scanner, a scanner can’t work without driver soft-
ware. One of the hidden factors driving the popularity of scanners is a standard called TWAIN.
TWAIN, the “acronym that isn’t” (see the following Note), is the collective name for a very popular
type of software driver that enables virtually any application to drive virtually any scanner or digital
camera.
Note
TWAIN, according to the official TWAIN online site, is short for nothing (“TWAIN is TWAIN”). However, one unofficial
name that’s made the rounds for years is “Technology Without an Interesting Name.”
Before TWAIN, each scanner maker had to provide device drivers and an image-scanning program
that was hard-wired to the scanner. These programs were usually limited, and most users preferred to
perform most image-editing with other programs, such as Adobe Photoshop. To get a scanned image
into Photoshop, for example, you had to close Photoshop, start the image-scanning program, scan the
image, save it, and load it into Photoshop. When combined with the limited multitasking capabilities
of early versions of Windows, this clunky process made scanning very difficult for most users. OCR
software vendors—such as Caere, creators of OmniPage—were among the first to need direct access to
the scanner. Before TWAIN, this meant they had to write direct-support drivers for every scanner they
wanted to support.
The result was that new scanners would often not work with existing OCR and graphics programs. In
addition, you had to make sure your scanner and software combination would work together.
TWAIN was created in 1992 by a group of industry vendors in the scanning hardware and OCR/imag-
ing software fields. More than 175 vendors form the TWAIN Coalition, which reviews standards devel-
oped by the TWAIN Working Group.
TWAIN provides a hardware-specific driver that can be integrated into OCR, imaging, word process-
ing, and other types of applications. Any TWAIN-compliant application can use any TWAIN device
installed on the system. A common use for TWAIN is to enable programs such as Adobe Photoshop to
access scanners within the program.
TWAIN devices such as scanners and digital cameras come with a driver that enables all TWAIN-com-
pliant applications’ access to the device. Although a user with two or more scanners (this writer has
Epson, Canon, and Polaroid scanners) will have a TWAIN driver for each device, any device can be
used with any software that supports TWAIN. Instead of each application needing a separate driver
routine for every scanner, each application only needs to have TWAIN compatibility to use any
TWAIN device on the system.