As I was about to scan 100s of photos and retouch them, I was faced with problem. My Epson 3200 scanner was not working well and really buggy. Researching the issues it turned out it was not compatible with Mac OS Ventura and Epson wasn't acting like it was about make another update to the scanner driver. In my search I found a solution, an app called Vuescan by hamrick.com which backwards engineers scanner drivers and updates them for current OS features and gives them a new interface and in my case, some new functionality.
To be fair, my scanner is something like 25 years old. It works really well, has some dust in it but that is about it for problems. It would also be extra fair to state that Epson's drivers are pretty terrible and feature light to say the least. the interface was bad and it didn't get better when it was controlled by Apple's interface in the Preview app. A lot of this is greatly improved upon in the Vuescan software... maybe a little too much improvement as it has so many features you can adjust it can take a while to get used to it.
Pros:
It works! Better interface, new features to use and streamlined the process overall.
Cons:
Comes at a high price, 140$ CAD which is a lot for a driver. It works on many scanners from what I understand so it should last a long time and I am sure it costs a penny or two to write something like this. The interface is split into three choice, from beginner to advanced but it takes some time to figure it all out. There are bugs but they promise updates often and I have no reason to doubt that for now.
It saved my from having to buy a new scanner that might not have worked any better than the old one and let me open files directly into Affinity photo which saved time. For me, worth it.
