Blue Moon Blog

I always wait several months to upgrade on software to allow plenty of time for everyone to work out the bugs. But after having waited about nine months to take the leap to Apple’s Leopard OS, I was eager to make the move. Before doing so, I’ve learned by being burned it’s best to check that other software or hardware companies support their prodcuts in a timely fashion for a new OS. I ran into trouble with my Microtek scanner last time I tried this when upgrading to Tiger. It took Microtek 18-24 months to make available a driver that would work with OSX 10.4. Yikes! Unfortunately, I discovered this fact after the upgrade, and was forced for a year or two to keep my ScanMaker 9800XL hooked up to my old computer in another room. What a pain!  Not efficient and a waste of time. This kind of problem has driven other artists to give up on Microtek completely.

Well, they’re more on the ball this time, as the driver was made available about eight months after Apple released Leopard. That’s not super-fast, but an improvement, and if you’re going to wait some months for the new OS, it’s probably worth it; at least, it is for me.  The Scanmaker 9800XL is a large scanner that accommodates the large comic book art I do (no more splitting apart pages with multiple scans and piecing them back together digitally), and is less expensive (now about $900.00; I paid $1100.00 five years back) than other comparable scanners (at least 2-3 times the price). It does a nice job on scans, saves tons of time given its image space. As long as they continue to improve on support, I’m going to stick with Microtek, and can recommend it.