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by ComputerGuru 1996 days ago
Not surprised there was a bug, but I am surprised it was patched (before or after shipping). I have an “enterprise grade” HP scanner (3500 F1) with buggy Twain drivers I had to manually disassemble and patch that will crash any time you try to duplex scan a single-sided sheet of paper. The blank page detection algorithm caused a null pointer dereference if two-sided mode was selected but the second side was elided.

The bug reproduced 100% of the time with all available versions of their drivers in any application using the TWAIN rather than WIA or proprietary scanner interface. It was as simple as scanning any one-sided document in duplex mode. I escalated the issue to their engineers who kept insisting the issue was with my PC until the product was EOL’d just a year or two after production.

I had other hardware issues pop up and ended up getting a Fujitsu for ADF document scanning and keeping the HP for scanning photos with the flatbed. Not many stand-alone hi-res dual color ADF/flatbed scanners out there.
1 comments
ryandrake 1996 days ago
If you're in software, you probably know this, but your bug was likely ignored not because it couldn't be reproduced, but because the engineers on the project were prioritizing feature work for the next version of the scanner, and did not have any support from management for fixing bugs in an already-shipping product. Sadly, driver software quality tends to max out at the level where customers won't return the hardware for a refund, and then the company abandons it and works on the next shiny new device.
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Dylan16807 1996 days ago
> If you're in software, you probably know this, but your bug was likely ignored not because it couldn't be reproduced, but because the engineers on the project were prioritizing feature work for the next version of the scanner, and did not have any support from management for fixing bugs in an already-shipping product.

Well, yes, but is it normal to insist no bug exists?

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baud147258 1996 days ago
perhaps if HP support admitted there's a bug, depending on the support contract (if applicable), HP would have had to fix it
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ComputerGuru 1996 days ago
That is actually correct.
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romwell 1996 days ago
Well, that's why the parent commenter was surprised that the scanning bug in the grandparent comment was fixed at all.
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