Weird Scanner-WIA issues

Quite regularly the scanner does not perform: it simply hangs, doing nothing. There is no error notification, nothing.
When starting a task I do see the power button led blinking, like it should be. The LED screen goes on, like it should be.
Then after a while, doing nothing, the power button led stops blinking and the LED screens goes off again.

I know that I should restart the printer, often things go well thereafter. Or, alternatively, after one or two scans, the issue is back again and should reboot the scanner again. Things may go well for hours.
Software is uptodate. Also I re-installed the software.

I was given to understand that this probably might having something to do with WIA. A Google search on WIA error retuns a boatload of reports/threads and generally the conclusion is to re-install the software and ever so often it does not really solve the issue.

I wonder:

1) IF... IF indeed it is a WIA failure, will Windows then always 'report' this, i.e. will it notify the user of this failure?
(As said above, with me, nothing is reported, the scanners just fails)

2) again, IF indeed it is a WIA failure, may simply shutting down and restarting the scanner solve the matter?
At least temporarily.

3) In services.msc Windows Imaging Acquisition - it says Automatic (Trigger Start)
At tab [Recovery] there are options referring to failures - defaulted to 'Take No Action'
What would happen if it/they would be set to 'Restart the Service'?

Thanks!

Thanks.
Assume I am to do this when scanner halts again?

This is when scanner software is trying to scan showing a pop-up "Busy Scanning"
Nothing happens.
Ends up in a pop-up "unable to receive data E581-B319"

Okay, I'll give it a try tomorrow or so. Will get back on this.
Meanwhile, any hints on the 'Failure' settings (see screenshot).
For me, this is 'misty' - I discovered those settings by coincidence.

After all these years pnp devices such as printers and scanners are still notoriously hard to deal with, i have a printer that works fine one day if you look at it wrong and it will stop working. The OEM software for it is next to useless and it even has a troubleshooting loop that does nothing most of the time.

It still hurts my brain sometimes to think that computers have come so far but this area of computers are pretty broken still.

A scanner may use WIA, but it maybe a TWAIN driver.

You can tell by the dialogue boxes. the WIA dialogues are different from the TWAIN method which opens the Scanner Application itself ("ScanGear" on my Canon AIO).

Some image editor applications, like IrfanView you can choose either acquisition method.

You are making an assumption it is the WIA driver, however it maybe TWAIN driver, the imaging application, or the scanner application.

Your WIA properties are exactly the same as mine as in your point 3), seems to be no problem.

To check the scanner itself use the Scanner Application they give you, probably has a TWAIN driver.

A Windows application like Scan, Photos, Paint etc uses the WIA method.

Check each of those acquisition methods.
Then move on to the imaging application and scanner application.

Interrupting a scan is likely to be fatal, just don't do it, wait until finished. The time taken for a scan varies depending on scanning resolution, depth of colour, scan size etc.

Paul Black said:

Hello @tfwul,

I do NOT know if this will help with diagnosis or trouble-shooting, but it should give you valuable information about your Scanner.

Copy & Paste the following [ ALL at once ] into a CMD Prompt and press Enter.

Code:

@echo off
PowerShell "Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_PNPEntity | Where-Object {$_.Name -Like '*Scan*'} | Sort-Object -Property Name | Format-Table -AutoSize"
PowerShell "Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_PNPEntity | Where-Object {$_.Name -Like '*Scan*'} | Sort-Object -Property Name | Format-List *"
pause

I hope this helps.

I gave it a few tries, not sure what I am supposed to get though.
Either CMD or Powershell (run as admin)
when pasting the entire block + enter
@echo off many not be used
when removing that I get
"Name : The term '.Name' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet" etc.
Sorry, I am not an expert on this.

Helmut said:

You are making an assumption it is the WIA driver, however it maybe TWAIN driver, the imaging application, or the scanner application.

Your WIA properties are exactly the same as mine as in your point 3), seems to be no problem.

Interrupting a scan is likely to be fatal, just don't do it, wait until finished. The time taken for a scan varies depending on scanning resolution, depth of colour, scan size etc.

Thanks for the suggestions.
Epson support believes it has something to do with WIA.

There is something with the 'communication' with the printer. When the scanner supposedly is scanning, but actually doing nothing at all and when I wait long enough I get the E581-B319 error (meantioned earlier).

I need to shut down and restart the printer, often things may go well then. The other day, however, after 1 scan, the software hanged again. Restart the scanner and things went fine for hours.

Tried to figure out the WIA settings (1st Failure, 2nd Failure..), but the "Help me set up recovery actions" ended up in "An internal error occurred (INVALID_HANDLE)" - Found that this has the case for quite a while already. On serverfault I found a 6-years'old post on this invalid handle.

Going from here to there, over I don't know how many sites after I ended up at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...drivers/image/
I gave up.
Probably I have to live with it. Seems there is no alternative but to restart the scanner when it fails and again and ...

Thanks again.