Very bad image quality from scanner

[Udi]

I have a UMAX AstraSlim SE USB scanner (which is basically an Artec E+ 48U in disguise). I used to use it under Linux many years ago, and it was pretty simple to set up; you just copy the firmware file, Artec48.usb (from the driver disc that came with the scanner), to somewhere in your Linux filesystem, and then make a configuration in /etc/sane.d/artec_eplus48u.conf like this:

option artecFirmwareFile /usr/share/sane/artec_eplus48u/Artec48.usb

Now I am trying to use the scanner on Linux again and I can't get it to work properly. The image is badly distorted (I wanted to attach an example but the board quota is full). The image is stretched vertically and shrinked horizontally. Sometimes it comes out duplicated horizontally. The colors come out awful. There seems to be line interlacing (every second line is a black line).

I am on Mint 6 and I scanned with kooka (I also scanned with the Mint Scanner Utility and got the same results). The scanner worked without creating a /etc/udev/rules.d/45-libsane.rules file, but just to be sure - I created one and configured it with the vendor ID and product ID and still no improvement on the image quality. I also tried scanning as root.

If anybody knows how to get this problem sorted, or has any ideas that I can try, I will appreciate the help.
Thanks in advance.
Udi.

[Husse]

This is a link to the SANE page for backends (drivers if you like)
http://www.sane-project.org/sane-backends-1.0.15.html
and for this chip
http://www.sane-project.org/man/sane-ar ... 48u.5.html