72Canon CanoScan LIDE ScannerGet your old scanner working with Windows 7 x64

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In recent months I’ve encountered sev­er­al prob­lems where people have con­tac­ted me ask­ing for help get­ting their USB scan­ners work­ing on new PCs.  In each case the new PCs have come with Win­dows 7 x64, and the scan­ners have been USB devices pro­duced by Can­on and Nikon.  Both of these ima­ging spe­cial­ists have ser­i­ously dropped the ball on sup­port­ing products, includ­ing some quite expens­ive premi­um kit from not all that long ago.

Update: this guide has been updated for Windows 10

The 2 most recent devices I’ve had to fix have been a Can­on Cano­Scan LIDE 50, and a Nikon CoolS­can IV ED.  The Can­on is a fairly stand­ard flat­bed scan­ner, and the Nikon is a slide scanner.

1. The first solu­tion, is a uni­ver­sal option, which sup­ports a lot of scan­ners on Win­dows 7 x64.

  • Down­load VueS­can from Hamrick
  • Con­nect the scanner
  • Install it
  • Unin­stall it
  • Open device man­ager (right click on my com­puter, choose prop­er­ties, click on device man­ager link on left hand side)
  • Find the scan­ner (unknown device usually)
  • Right click, and select “update driver software”
  • Choose “browse my com­puter for driver software”
  • Click browse and browse to c:\VueScan
  • Click next etc until finished
  • Down­load and install the scan­ner applic­a­tion from the man­u­fac­turer, but don’t install the drivers

2. The second solu­tion, which I was able to use for the Can­on, is a spe­cific­ally made driver

  • Down­load the cus­tom­ised driver cour­tesy of web­whitenoise
  • Install via device manager
  • Install the Can­on Toolbox

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72 Comments

gravatarJohn Moffat

Can you help with a can­on 9900f to work with win­dows 7 32 bit.

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gravatarBombinhas

Installed everything and can not make it work with cano­scan lide 20 and win­dows 10. Vues­can installed and the cano­scan soft­ware when I select the twain ori­gin Vues­can 1.0 says is not pos­sible to select it. So I can not scan yet…

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gravatarMurphy

Tried the 1’st approach and I only man­aged to install the driver, so it is not com­plain­ing in the device man­ager. How­ever for the prop­er func­tion­ing it needs the TWAIN part, which is not avail­able when you install scan­ner tool­box. Tried with the Cano­Scan Lide 20.

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gravatarFrancel Kelbrick

Dear Jon, I have an old PC run­ning Win­dows 7, I received a Can­on Cano­scan LiDE20 from a friend. Not com­pat­ible with their com­puter. They could ot sup­ply the drivers. I’m try­ing to get this to work. What do you suggest?

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gravatarAlejandro Téllez C.

Esto no me sir­vió. Yo tengo un Col­orPage-Vivid 1200XE y esta cosa no me fun­cionó para instalarle el controlador..
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gravatarks

Thanks for the info, man­age to use option 2 meth­od to make Lide50 to work under win10 x64

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gravatarCornelis

Very good sug­ges­tion. I could not pur­sue the second option becas­ue the drivers were unavailable.

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gravatarAndy

Used Vues­can­ner soft­ware on Win 10 x64. Did­n’t work at first, had to dis­con­nect and recon­nect USB and restart the soft­ware. No need to pay for the soft­ware. Just take a screen­shot of the scan and use that to save to file.

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gravatarScott

Vues­can simply isn’t an option. It is over­priced, more than the hard­ware is (an all in one printer/scanner street price is under 25 dol­lars US). It seems that Soft­ware developers think they own the world as of late. Even the people Ive worked with in the IBM AS400 arena are not as greedy.

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gravatargrange

Easy solu­tion is to use the LIDE 70 x64 drivers, LIDE70 cano­scan tool­box soft­ware and vues­can. just install both, con­nect your LIDE80 and vues­can will use the LIDE70 soft­wares while recog­nising your LIDE80 as being attached

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gravatarJon Scaife

Addi­tion­al information…
The mod­i­fied driver by “DNA” claims to have 4 modifications
1. Inser­tion of Hard­ware ID
2. Inser­tion of Device ID
3. Replace­ment of LiDE 60 Col­our Pro­file with cor­rect LiDE 50 ICC file
4. Inser­tion of cor­rect flat­bed scan area dimen­sions and ima­ging capabilities

The device and hard­ware ID changes are made in CNQL60.inf
The col­our pro­file file is CNS12Z.icc which is in the CNQL60 subfolder
I was­n’t able to find a change to account for #4 — which is what I think stopped my 4th attempt from working

So — I’ve checked every file for any bin­ary changes

All of the files in the root (except the inf) are identical
All files in cnq_x64 are identical
all of the files in cnql60 (except the icc) are identical
All of the files in CNQSG111 are identical

So only 2 files have changed — the .icc col­our pro­file file and the .inf

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gravatarJon Scaife

Fur­ther­more

The icc file has been copied (unmod­i­fied) from the 32bit Lide50 drivers. So the DNA driver con­sists of the Lide60 x64 driver, with the col­our pro­file from the lide 50 32bit drivers. And a mod­i­fied INF file. So, mak­ing a mod­i­fied lide 20 driver (if pos­sible) should con­sist just of copy­ing the Lide20 32bit col­our pro­file (icc) file and mak­ing the right modi­fic­a­tions to the INF file

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gravatarRich

Hi Jon. I’ve only just noticed these new­er replies, thanks for these. I would still like to exper­i­ment, how­ever after your com­ment on 20th Sep that you nev­er got the drivers work­ing I chucked my N670u scan­ner (which I bought at a car boot sale this sum­mer for a quid) in a box in the corner of my garden ready to take to the tip when i next go. That tip trip has yet to come, so tech­nic­ally I still have the scan­ner — though I’m not too sure the last 2 months out­side will have been kind to it.. if they have then I will have a play with the drivers soon 🙂

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gravatarRich

Hi. I’m very keen to try the N670u (lide20) driver, but the FTP link is not work­ing. Is it pos­sible to re-upload the file please? Cheers, Rich.

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gravatarRich

Many thanks for the reply, good to see this post is still act­ive 🙂 , I had pre­vi­ously read about using XP mode, but was try­ing to avoid that. What I was hop­ing for was a new link for these files, so I could try them:

http://ftp.diymediahome.org/DIYMH_Canon_LiDE20_x64_Driver_alpha4.7z
http://ftp.diymediahome.org/DIYMH_Canon_LiDE20_x64_Driver_alt.7z

Spe­cific­ally, I think the http://ftp.diymediahome.org FTP serv­er is no longer act­ive, but per­haps someone has copy of them, or Jon could re-upload elsewhere.

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gravatarAndrew

Hi, is there an update here on get­ting the LiDE20 work­ing with Win 7 64bit ?

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gravatarMichael Roth

Hello Jon,

I’ve fol­lowed this con­ver­sa­tion with great interest as I have the same Prob­lem with my N670U and Win7x64.
I’m won­der­ing if there is a final res­ult yet or if you need someone else to test your efforts?

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gravatarJon Scaife

I haven’t got any­where with this in a long time, but recently came back to it. There are some indic­a­tions that the Lide20 might work with a hacked Lide25 driver, although I’m fairly scep­tic­al about the chances of suc­cess. I’ll look at build­ing some new test can­did­ates over the next 2–3 weeks. If any­one has a Lide20 they’re will­ing to test with that would be great. If I can get a lide20 driver going then a N670U should also work with the same hack — i believe it uses the same drivers as the lide20

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gravatarJimmy

Hi Jon, i was won­der­ing if you were got Can­on Lide 20 Drivers to fin­ish and work­ing. I was try­ing to test your latest build from post below, but your ftp is down. I was not able to down­load to try. If you have fin­ished mod­ding the drivers and have them work­ing.. Is it pos­sible if you can provide a link. Thank you in advance

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gravatarToto

First option dies not work. When I unin­stall the scan­ner, device man­ager does not detect it any longer, not even as “unknown device”, it simply does not exist under Win­dows. So, no chance to update driver soft­ware or anything.

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gravatarJon Scaife

Unin­stall it how? Its very unusu­al for Win 7 not to see the hard­ware at all. What phys­ic­al con­nec­tion does the scan­ner use?

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gravatarMohammad

This tor­rent work with me 100% for Cano­Scan LIDE 20 for Win­dows 7 64bit
[link removed]

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gravatarJon Scaife

Thanks for the link Mohammad, but VueS­can is com­mer­cial soft­ware; a link to a tor­rent of it could get us in trouble so I’ve had to remove it. VueS­can will of course work — it is an excel­lent solu­tion if you’re happy to pay for it 🙂

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gravatarRobert

I have a ‘Epson Per­fec­tion 1260 Photo’ scan­ner, which is a 32-bit scan­ner. I have now bought a Win­dows 7 64-bit com­puter and Epson tells me they have not mod­i­fied the drivers of this scan­ner, so I can­not use it. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

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gravatarKacem

Hello Jon,

I am struggeling since 2 weeks to use a Can­on Lide 80 device with my new 64 bit Win­dows 7 Dell PC. The deep­er research I found in the web about the sub­ject is your hereby post and I am won­der­ing if you had the chance to push this work fur­ther to get some­thing workable ?
Many thanks in advance for your appre­ci­ated effort.

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gravatarisis

I’ve tried both of these approaches and neither worked for me so far.

The VueS­can worked great as long as I used the scan­ner applic­a­tion that came with it, but it cov­ers all images with water­marks, unless you buy the paid ver­sion, which I can­’t afford. 

I tried to use Cano­Scan Tool­box with it, but when I choose ‘Save’ and hit Scan, I’m promp­ted to ‘Select Source’ and it dis­plays VueS­can TWAIN 1.0 (32−32). I click Select, and get an error mes­sage ‘Unable to select TWAIN source’.

When I click on Scan‑1, then Scan, it prompts me to ‘Spe­cify a pro­gram where the scanned image is trans­ferred’. Why would I ‘trans­fer’ it to a pro­gram? I have no clue what that means. I simply want to scan and save to my desktop.

I found the install­a­tion of DNA very con­fus­ing. I plugged in the scan­ner, extrac­ted the files, and hoped Win­dows would find the driver on its own. No such luck. I finally loc­ated it, and for a moment it was recog­nized by the sys­tem. I tried Cano­Scan and had the same prob­lems I had with VueS­can. After I unplugged the scan­ner and plugged it back in, the driver was­n’t recog­nized at all anymore.

The DNA driver is appar­ently unsigned, so Win­dows 7 64-bit does­n’t seem to like it. The developer at the link you pos­ted said that you have to log on in safe mode every time and turn off some­thing in Win­dows so it will recog­nize it. That’s way too stress­ful to me, espe­cially since Win­dows flashes threat­en­ing popups dis­cour­aging this behavior.

Before all this, I tried to install the Can­on LiDE60 driver, which I’d heard works with LiDE50, but I’m not sure I installed it cor­rectly. I can­’t find it any­where in my system. 

Has any­one figured out any oth­er option? The VueS­can worked great, but the scan­ner soft­ware did­n’t, so maybe there’s some work­around to use only the driver, with some oth­er soft­ware that will recog­nize the driver?

Thanx so much for any new insight any­one might have.

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gravatarJon Scaife

I’ve sent you some­thing to try. The DNA driver IS the mod­i­fied ’60 driver. I don’t know where you heard that it requires safe mode — I can assure you that it does­n’t. Win­dows WILL warn you when you first install the driver but you can choose to install any­way. Extract the files and then install it thru device man­ager. If you don’t know how to install drivers via device man­ager let me know I’ll do a step-by-step for you

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gravatarOlivier

The best solu­tion I have found is to install a vir­tu­al machine run­ning Win­dows XP: if you have kept your old XP disk and the license num­ber from the bot­tom of your old PC, then it is rel­at­ively easy to set-up using VMware play­er using these instruc­tions on EduGeek
Once installed, you can basic­ally start Win­dows XP in a win­dow, and install your old scan­ner driver (and any oth­er XP soft­ware for that mat­ter) and it all works like a charm!

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gravatarJon Scaife

This is an option Olivi­er but I think its a bit like using a sledge­ham­mer to crack a nut — run­ning a whole vir­tu­al PC just for your scan­ner is quite a lot of hassle espe­cially when you take into account the need to install secur­ity updates for both VMware and the copy of Win­dows XP installed with­in it! You also either need the Pro, Ulti­mate or Enter­prise edi­tions of Win­dows Vista/7/8 or you need a val­id Win­dows XP seri­al num­ber. As a last resort it will work but if at all pos­sible it is bet­ter to get the scan­ner work­ing nat­ively in Win­dows 7 which is what this post is focused on. That said — thanks for the link — I’m sure it will be use­ful to any­one that needs the last resort option. For those that don’t have an XP seri­al but DO have Pro­fes­sion­al, Ulti­mate or Enter­prise you can do the same thing via “Win­dows XP Mode” which is avail­able to down­load for free from Microsoft. Cheers.

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gravatarToto

Did not “work like a charm” for me. I installed win­dows xp mode and even though my Broth­er mfc6490cw is installed with old drivers and all, it does not work under this vir­tu­al envir­on­ment. XPmode is cum­ber­some, slow as snail, I don´t even get more than 10 fps play­back on my linetester.
I am a car­toon anim­at­or, I use this A3 scan­ner to scan in my draw­ings. I upgraded to win­dows 7 and even though Broth­er offers a 64 bits driver for the machine, it is not 100% twain com­pat­ible, caus­ing my anim­a­tion soft­ware to freeze when I try to scan in some draw­ings. I do not recom­mend win­dows XP mode, it´s like going back to win­dows 95… everything is a problem.

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gravataralejandro

Keep Work­ing my friend for resolve this com­pat­ib­ily prob­lem in win­dows 7 64 bit. For me it´s much bet­ter the twain drivers for the scan­ner Can­on Lide 20 than VueScan.

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gravatarlupo

Hi,

found that post after some long invest­ig­a­tion on how to get my Cano­scan N670U to work with Win­dows 7 Prof x64. I used your first idea. My com­puter now recog­nizes the scan­ner. But neither the Can­on Tool­box nor Irfan View can find it as a twain source. Am I doing any­thing wrong? I’m using the Cano­scan Tool­box 4.9 and I used the latest ver­sion of Vues­can. Which I com­pletely removed, after the driv­er­install­a­tion (I even deleted c:/vuescan).

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gravatarJon Scaife

With the Nikon the soft­ware I used was Nikon’s own soft­ware, which found the scan­ner fine. I’m not sure why you’re not get­ting twain access — VueS­can does provide a twain driver. What is your scan­ner iden­ti­fied as in device man­ager? If you click on the driver tab and driver details but­ton what files are ver­sions are lis­ted there?

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gravatarlupo

Hey there, thanks for your fast response 🙂
It’s being iden­ti­fied as Can­on LiDE20, which in fact used the same drivers as the N670U in former win­dows-ver­sions. It says, that the Scan­ner is work­ing fine.
On the first page of prop­er­ties it says:
Man­u­fac­turer: not available
Mod­el: Cano Scan
Mod­el­num­ber: not available
Cat­egory: Scanner
Descrip­tion: not available

On the page “Hard­ware” it says:
Man­u­fac­turer: Ham­rick Software

If I click on Properties->Drivers:
Driver­man­u­fac­turer: Ham­rick Software
Driver­d­ate: 11.01.1999
Driverver­sion: 1.0.0.0

On Details it says:
Driverfiles:
C:\Windows\system32\drivers\ksthunk.sys
C:\Windows\system32\drviers\usbscan.sys

I hope I trans­lated everything right, because my win­dows is in ger­man lan­guage. If not, I hope you under­stand everything I wrote, oth­er­wise feel free to ask, my eng­lish isn’t that good 😉

Thanks in for­ward for your help!

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gravatarJon Scaife

I won­der if it’s pos­sible to rehack the drivers to work with a LiDE20 as well as LiDE50. Can you send me the hard­ware ID for the scan­ner? It should look some­thing like “%LPTENUMCNQL25.DeviceDesc%=CNQL25Install,USBVID_04A9&PID_2220” — its found in device man­ager, device prop­er­ties, details tab, and in the pull-down box change from “descrip­tion” to “hard­ware IDs”. I’ll see if it’s pos­sible to hack some­thing together

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gravatarlupo

Wow, that would be simply amaz­ing! Okay, I think I’ve found the inform­a­tion you asked for. There are two IDs:

USB\VID_04A9&PID_220D&REV_0100
USB\VID_04a9&PID_220D

Again, thanks in advance! 🙂

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gravatarJon Scaife

OK. No prom­ises yet, but give this a try for me and let me know how you get on.
ftp://anonymous@diymediahome.org:anon@ftp.diymediahome.org/DIYMH_Canon_LiDE20_x64_Driver.7z
Use them as per the instruc­tions for option 2 above — so install them via device man­ager and then install the can­on cano­scan tool­box for vista x32 (from http://files.canon-europe.com/files/soft25829/Software/s7117ENx.exe). If it seems to work check that it is using the cor­rect scan­ner area — it might not be

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gravatarlupo

Hey there,

again, thank you very much! 🙂
I did it as you told me and the device­m­an­ager still says, that it’s a Lide 20. When I start Cano­scan Tool­box, it says, there would be a Lide 50. When I try so start scan­ning it says: “Can­not com­mu­nic­ate with scan­ner. Cable my be dis­con­nec­ted or scan­ner my be turned off. Check status. Scan­ner driver will be closed.”
Well, the scan­ner is con­nec­ted, so it should work. Any ideas?

Greetz

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gravatarlupo

When I clicked Ok there, there appears anoth­er message:

“Unable to open TWAIN source. Please check con­nec­ten. Then re-start Toolbox.”

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gravatarlupo

Great, I’ll give it a try now 🙂
Thanks again for your work!! 🙂

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gravatarlupo

Hello again,

I’ve got some bad news 🙁
With your 2nd ver­sion of the driver, I get the same error as with the 1st version.
When I try your 3rd idea and tell the device man­ager to install the driver, it says, that there isn’t any driver to work with my scanner.

Greet­ings

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gravatarlupo

Hello again :),

ver­sion 3 is def­in­itely one step forward!
This is what happened:
After I had installed the driver, the scan­ner star­tet mak­ing some noises, I think he cal­ib­rated itself? He did the same thing after the reboot again, that did­n’t hap­pen with the first two versions.
In Cano­scan Tool­box I was able to chose between “Cano­Scan LiDE 20 11.0 (32−32)” and “Cano­Scan LiDE 50 1.1 (32−32)”. When I chose LiDE 50, the same thing hap­pens as before. But when I chose LiDE 20, the scan­ner makes some noises again, when I open it, the scan-thing und er the glass turns on the blue light and moves like 5mms for­ward. Then I get the fol­low­ing mes­sage (cano­scan as well as irfan­view): First win­dows: “Can­not com­mu­nic­ate with scan­ner. Cable may be dis­con­nec­ted or scan­ner my be turned off. Check status. Scan­ner driver will be closed.” When I click ok: “TWAIN error! Can­’t con­nect to device or the TWAIN driver is not installed!”.
Again, thank you very much! 🙂

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gravatarlupo

Btw, the light might also have anoth­er col­or, like white or some­thing, I’m colorblind 😉

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gravatarProgi1984

Hi, I have a Win­dows 7 x64 bits French, if you need an anoth­er Can­on Cano­scan Lide 20 for tests, i am there.

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gravatarJon Scaife

Thanks Progi. And Lupo — thanks for your patience. I’ve exhausted the easy ways of try­ing to fix up a driver, so now I’m dig­ging around try­ing to find anoth­er way. I’ve got a very busy week next week but a couple of weeks hol­i­day after that, so hope­fully I’ll get back to you in the next 2 weeks. Sorry it isn’t sooner.

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gravatarlupo

No need to apo­lo­gize 🙂 Thank you very much for the work you do and take your time. If you have any­thing ready for test­ing, just let me know =) Thanks again in advance! 🙂

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gravatarJon Scaife

Ah, sorry — my fault. The bounce was for an “illeg­al attach­ment” — I did­n’t know gmail did­n’t allow exe files, even when inside archives? Will send again with a mod­i­fied extension…

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gravatarJon Scaife

Did you get my e‑mail? Any luck with it?
I’ve finally found time for anoth­er look and have tried a few more things. I’m not ter­ribly optim­ist­ic, but worth a try. (Note: this is dif­fer­ent to what I e‑mailed to you)… 4th attempt

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gravatarProgi1984

Always the error “Unable to select twain device”… but now the scan­ner make some sounds like init.

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gravatarRene

Hi Jon,
thanks a lot for your efforts to get this LIDE scan­ners work­ing. Any good news? I have some of these Scan­ners here and tried to get V4 but the ftp link did­nt work for me. Can you email please and i try to get it work­ing under w7/64?
Best regards and greet­ings from germany

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gravatarlupo

Sorry, I did not click reply, my post is on top of the com­ments, but I don’t want to repost it 🙂

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gravatarAde D.R.

Hello! Recently, I just con­nec­ted my Can­on LiDE 20 on my new installed Win 7 64bit. I have scrolled up and down in this thread and the prob­lem now is about can­’t find the TWAIN source. Is there any hope or pos­sib­ilty to fix that issue?

Thanks a lot before.

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