WIA Scanners

WIA Scanners

What is WIA?

Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) is a new standard for scanner drivers to be written. The standard that has been custom for so long was the TWAIN standard. But Microsoft introduced WIA drivers in Windows ME. WIA provides developers with a relatively easy way to write support for scanners. So many scanner manufactures, looking to save money on development, are going with WIA scanners as their primary source to drive older scanners. The end result is the user is stuck with a basic interface, with little to no advanced features. A list of WIA scanners, provided with your Windows installation can be found here.

Why WIA?

As I touched on in the last paragraph one of the reasons is money. It takes less time to develop a WIA driver, and the hope is that they will be able to have a longer life cycle. Because it is a standard provided by Microsoft they can write their operating systems to work with older WIA drivers. The good news for consumers is that their scanners may be supported longer by their manufacturers. The bad news is that you are stuck with software that only handles the basic functions of scanning. But there is an answer to this problem! WIA is accesable through TWAIN, so many of the scanner programs out there will work with your scanner. And our products, Art-Scan and Art-Copy, replace the interface that you are stuck with. They also allow you to have many of the advanced features that your scanner is capable of; from PDF and Tiff creation that Art-Copy provides, to advanced color controls that Art-Scan provides.

What WIA drivers are automatically supported by Windows XP and ME?

Windows XP and Windows ME, both come bundled with a host of WIA drivers. So all of our software will work with these scanners with out issue:

Windows XP
Acer/Benq
Compaq
Epson
Fujitsu
HP
Kodak
Microtek
Ricoh
Umax
Xerox

Windows ME
Primax Colorado
Epson
HP
Microtek
Umax
Visioneer

Windows XP

Acer/Benq
AcerScan 310
AcerScan 320
AcerScan 620
AcerScan 640
AcerScan 640BT
AcerScan 640BU
AcerScan 1240UT
AcerScan 5100
S2W 3300
S2W 4300 (16v)