Ill informed sales guy

One of my stops today was to see the IRIScan Express2. It seemed like an OK scanner, but with crappy software. The guy demonstrating used their Readiris 11 software to scan. I happen to have a copy of Readiris that was free with my Fujitsu ScanSnap. Here’s a screenshot of the version I have (the one he demoed looked the same).

I asked him if it was TWAIN compliant and if I could use it in other programs (for instance, ReceiptWallet). He swore it was. I asked if I could try using Image Capture to scan; he said I could. It didn’t show up. Image Capture should show all TWAIN compliant scanners. Next I looked in /Library/Image Capture/TWAIN Data Sources. It was empty; all the TWAIN drivers should be there. I decided to stop arguing with the guy as he obviously didn’t have a clue, unless they somehow used some magic TWAIN driver that only shows up in their app.Now here is the dilemma. I’m going to have people ask about the scanner and my answer right now is “I haven’t tested it.”. They have a show special that makes the scanner $99 (normally $149) which is pretty good. Should I get it? I probably will and then if it doesn’t work, I’ll warn people to avoid it. They have a more expensive version (IRIScan Executive 2) that has the same hardware, but includes Cardiris 4 for scanning business cards. It doesn’t seem all that impressive, but I’ll reserve final judgement until I try it out.This leads into another one of my rant; why do hardware vendors have such crappy looking software?

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