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I have an Epson Stylus SX438W printer / scanner, and when I try to use it as a scanner it has this bizarre automatic "feature" which causes it to detect the white background of whatever I'm scanning, and decide that I only want to scan the individual elements, which it does badly. The net result is that instead of 1 scan of the whole page, I get 4 or 5 scans of parts of the page.

Anyone know how to stop this behaviour? There are various options in the menus of the Epson Scanner software, but the ones that sound relevant are greyed out so I can't access them (e.g., "Auto area segmentation" and "Trimming", both of which are set to "on" with no obvious way to turn them off).

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  • What OS is in question, and exactly how are you accessing the printer's options? (IE: Are you using "As Administrator" if in Windows?) Nov 24, 2012 at 18:37
  • It's on Mac OSX, and I'm accessing the options through Epson's own software: it's called Epson SCAN
    – Ben
    Nov 24, 2012 at 18:40

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OK: I figured out a way round it. I went into Professional Mode and set "Thumbnail cropping area" to large, which seems to have worked for the image I was trying to scan (my child's Christmas drawing), although it still leaves me wondering why the default behaviour is so bizarre, and whether this setting will work for everything...

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  • Yeah, I was gonna say that with our Epson there is a preview feature where you can select what's to be scanned. (Have never seen the behavior you describe, though.) Nov 25, 2012 at 0:24

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