Comment 8 for bug 494759

Hi Robert, not sure if we talk about the same thing. With the current simplescan there is no real purpose of doing a 75dpi scan first, as I will have to do the scan of the full page afterwards anyways.
The idea of the preview was, to do a scan with the lowest DPI settings, then be able to mark an area of the picture (like the crop tool) and then press on scan. With this, the scanner could move quickly to the beginning of the start of the area to scan (without scanning or with lowest setting, I don't know what is possible here), then scan to the end of the marked area, stop and move back. This way I would only have scan lets say 15% of the full page height in high DPI resolution and would be a lot quicker.

Just as an example for my scanner I just stopped the time:
Scanning 1 picture at 1200 DPI with simplescan: 4min 32sec

Scanning 1 picture with a 'preview capable' scan program:
Preview scan: 4 secs
Actual scan: 1 min 16 sec

I know that the goal of simple scan is to be simple, which makes a lot of sense. All the DPI, colorspace, filetype, a hundred windows and other settings stuff of XSANE completly overstained my mom and gf all the time. Putting this up in the profiles was a brilliant idea, as most people never have to worry about the details, but only have to choose the suitable predefined profile (Text, Photo). Any experienced user can still change the preferences and not loose a lot functionality. So this is a good thing. But there is no possibility to do a scan with a preview at the moment.