I’d been wanting a scanner for a while, and kept procrastinating.  Eventually I got fed up with myself and drove to Staples and bought a Canon CanoScan LiDE 70.  After getting home, I remembered why I don’t make impulse purchases at stores.

The scanner seems decent, but does not work in Linux, making it useless to me since I switched to Ubuntu.

• Scanners not supported by SANE – Canon LiDE 70
• SANE: Supported Devices – Canon
• Ubuntu Forums – Will SANE ever support the Canon CanoScan LiDE 70?

I wrote to Canon several times asking them to support my OS, and they refuse:

Thank you for your inquiry. We value you as a Canon customer and appreciate the opportunity to assist you.

Unfortunately, Canon does not write or support any drivers or software for the various Linux operating systems. The driver development information is proprietary information, kept at Canon Japan, and is not available to the public. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance with your LiDE
70 scanner.

Thank you for choosing Canon.

I told them that they don’t need to write drivers themselves; they can be written by the Linux Driver Project for free.  All Canon has to do is provide the proprietary communication protocol information, which will not be disclosed, but they refuse to do anything to help:

While considering the desire to provide the best possible support for Canon‘s products, Canon USA must make decisions on which products to provide driver support and platforms to provide drivers for.  Currently, Canon USA has decided to support only the Microsoft Windows and the Macintosh operating systems.

Canon USA has announced no plans to provide or assist in supporting the Linux platform with the consumer line products.  We understand, and sincerely apologize for any frustration this may cause if your are using an operating system Canon USA does not support.

We sincerely apologize for the difficulties and inconvenience this reply may cause. As a Canon customer, your satisfaction with our products and service is very important to us. We are dedicated to doing our best to provide support of our products, warranties, and customers with the support options we have available to us.

We remain committed to gaining your confidence and business once again. If, in the future, you reconsider your decision regarding your Canon scanner, we hope you will provide us with another opportunity to serve you. Until that time, we hope any replacement products perform to your expectations.

Thank you for contacting Canon.

Blah blah standard form response.  Guess I won’t make the mistake of buying their products again.

It looks like there might be hope, as Jürgen Ernst is working on a SANE backend for “CanoScan LiDE 600F”, which would support the LiDE 70, too.  I can understand not wanting to waste employees’ time on a tiny minority OS, but it’s ridiculous that users have to completely reverse-engineer their products’ protocols in order to use them, when manufacturers could very easily make this information available for us to write drivers with at no cost to them.