Canonscan Lide 20 not working with Win10

January 9, 2019 9:11 PM

I have an old Canoscan Lide 20 scanner that I would like to have work with my Windows 10 laptop (64 bit if that matters). Canon no longer make drivers for this particular scanner and seem never to have supported 64 bit anything, as far as I can tell. I can find downloads that are supposed to be drivers that will work, but am very wary about downloading random stuff from teh interwebs when I'm not sure of the source.

VueScan apparently will make it work, but you have to pay for the Pro version that doesn't watermark all your images.

Solvusoft apparently do have a Canon driver that will work, but I've never heard of them and can't seem to find a review that will tell me if the download package is what it says it is.

Can anyone help?

posted by ninazer0 to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Have you tried 32 bit drivers? I have an old Like 300 that works with my 64 bit Win10 laptop (through an old version of Photoshop).

I'll poke around my setup to see what I have installed.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:23 PM on January 9, 2019

Just confirming if you're weren't sure that yes, VueScan will definitely work for this. And as someone who does a lot of scanning with a variety of scanners and OS's I find that it's well worth paying for to avoid all the driver hassle and for the flexibility and ease it offers to choose settings (or to let it choose settings for you).
posted by theory at 11:02 PM on January 9, 2019

I use a Nikon Coolscan on my W8/I5/64bit PC, with Vuescan. Just click on Vuescan and it works, no need for a driver as such. I'd rather not pay for it, but for simplity's sake the plug'n'play nature of Vuescan is hard to beat.
posted by GeeEmm at 2:42 AM on January 10, 2019

If it's not too inconvenient for your workflow you could also try dual- or live-booting into a Linux distro. We've had a few LiDE scanners of this era and they've always just worked on Linux but been frustratingly inconsistent with what Windows versions and drivers they'll talk to.
posted by BobInce at 4:57 AM on January 10, 2019

Oh come on. Support your independent developers. Ed Hamrick has been doing this for 25+ years and makes a quality product, which I have been using since at least v4 or 5. 39 bucks and better than HP’s, Canon’s, or Apple’s own software.

The Pro edition is on sale for $69. As far as I know, the Standard edition does not watermark images from flat bed scanners.
posted by sudogeek at 11:20 AM on January 10, 2019

I had a LiDe that stopped working with Win7.

It did work under an instance of Virtual XP - had to manually turn on the USB emulation, though.
posted by porpoise at 12:12 PM on January 10, 2019 [1 favorite]

I have a Cannoscan Lide 30 and ran into the same problems. I don't remember *everything* that I tried but I couldn't get it working under windows 10. What did work was using the SANE application under linux.

In practice, I run SANE from inside gimp using the xsane/gimp plugin . Once the scan is done I export from within gimp to jpg or pdf

I'm dual booting but you could probably get this working by running lubuntu inside virtualbox .
posted by metadave at 2:27 PM on January 11, 2019