To archive analog family photos and bring them to the digital world, we've recently found a very cheap "Epson Perfection 1260 Photo" at a pawn shop. It came without a driver disk but being a not-that-old USB-Scanner, we've expected it to work out of the box on Windows. The scanner supposedly has the ability to scan with 16-bit per color channel (usually 8-bit on your every-day scanner), and for archiving purposes it's usually a good idea to try and preserve material with the highest possible color depth and a meaningful resolution (600dpi+, depending on Material). Well, we were very wrong about the scanner easily working: Not only does it not work on anything more recent than Windows Vista, but also only on 32-bit drivers for that. Now, Epson did a very good job in customer care - not...
* There is no driver for Win7, Win8, Win8.1 or Windows 10. The support site itself points to some software that brings a TWAIN driver that should work with Epson Scanners, but buying that software is almost the price you'd pay to get a more recent model that works on Win7+ OS's.
* Extensive (hours and hours) of google-fu brought up some methods to get a vista driver work on Windows 7 and supposedly Windows 8, but for that you'd have to disable drive signature enforcement and do other stunts to finally have a device in the list that says "The Device is working properly", but in fact doesn't do anything and definitely not with 16 bits per color channel.
* After some check on our Old-Notebooks-Pile, we've even found a working one with Windows Vista 32 bit. So we installed the driver, just to find out that the "Epson Scan Utility" itself is nowhere to be found on the Epson Drivers/Support pages. Since the Printer came without CD that posed to be a problem, because ...
* ... the default scan program of Windows or anything else we've tried (Gimp2, Imaging, ...) would only support 8 bit per color channel, when the scanner is supposed to be able to scan 16 bit per color channel.
* After about 10 hours (nope, not exaggerating) of research and experiments, I've decided to let the idea to use this scanner on windows die and focused to get something done
[Solution]
I've set up an older notebook, did a hardware check (And indeed, one memory module was faulty! Never work on unchecked hardware!) and installed Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 - that took something like 20 minutes and 2 or 3 minutes of actual doing something, like getting a coffee or two.
Right after the very basic installation, I've installed XSane and did not expect much, but... the configuration showed 14 bit per channel instead o the default 8! It appears that the scanner is "only" doing real 14-bit per channel, but in the end I finally had my test photo scanned with 3x16bit color depth @ 600 dpi. And besides working out of the box, the sane backend had a lot of preconfigured settings for some of the scanners special functions, like scanning photo negatives of different types (AGFA, Kodak, ...).
I'm now happily scanning at the highest possible quality the setup allows
