Cannot Scan At All in Color under Monterey and M1 Processor

[Pinyon_Jay]

My office used Acrobat to scan successfully for years on Intel Mac computers. Now we have switched to an M1 processor running OS X Monterey. Everything is updated, drivers, Acrobat, Monterey. The printer is the same one we have used for two years, a Brother MFC-J995DW.

Now we get constant error messages with error -9921, operation not allowed and other errors when trying to scan with Acrobat. Scanning with a less fully featured app works, so the scanner is still functional, but Acrobat is not. We have managed to scan in black and white with difficulty in Acrobat, but not ever in color. It has to be force quitted if we try to scan in color. Checking the Rosetta emulation in Get Info makes no difference. 

Is this a known problem or is it something we are doing wrong? 

Thank you. 

[gary_sc]

Please keep in mind that Acrobat, by itself, cannot scan. Rather, it uses software called Twain to link it to other software that scans. Typically, on the Mac it uses Apple's Image Capture to do the scanning. SOME software provides links to Acrobat (but this is rare). 

I am not on Monterey myself but I am aware that if you need to run a plugin that's not updated to M1, you need to run the application for that plugin in Rosetta 2 mode. So, see if you can run Image Capture directly on the M1 and also see if there is Brother software on your computer and try and run that. 

Hopefully I've given you enough of a range of things to try and experiment with to get this running. (And as a side comment, I find Image Capture so dreadful that I always scan with top-quality scanning software (SilverFast), put the results in a folder on my desktop, and then process the scans directly in Acrobat for further processing. I never scan from within Acrobat.)

Good luck!

[Pinyon_Jay]

I have been using the Brother scanning software in the last few days, but it has no preview of the scan function, which I liked when Acrobat worked, with an Intel Mac on an older OS X. 

Does SilverFast SE provide enough functionality for relatively simple scanning of texts? 

Thank you for your suggestions and explanation of how Acrobat works. 

[gary_sc]

Hi Pinyon,

To answer your question, yes. it will give you more than you need.

Recently my wife needed to update her laser printer and she wanted to be able to scan as well. We got a Brother printer/scanner. I was shocked how bad the new "office and home office scanning software is. It is dumbed down an amazing amount so that there is essentially nothing the user can do beyond things like "lighter" or "darker." For what my wife does, it's adequate and if she needs a better quality scan, she comes to me! 

Since you are both aware and concerned about the quality of your scan, you may wish to see a blog I wrote for Adobe some years ago on how to get a good quality scan. You need to be signed into your free Adobe Account to view the article.

Scanning Clean, Searchable PDFs

https://community.adobe.com/t5/adobe-community-professionals/scanning-clean-searchable-pdfs/m-p/4785...

[Pinyon_Jay]

Silverfast does not list Brother as a supported device, so I was not able to download it. It requires a manufacturer first. 

Vuescan does list Brother as supported. 

What is your opinion on Vuescan? 

Thank you for the link, although it says access denied even with a sign-in. It looks very useful. 

I appreciate your help and education. 

[gary_sc]

VERY sorry about that laps of brain cells. When you said that I slapped the back of my head from the front side.

Vuescan is good. There are a couple of things I'm not a fan of but I think that that's because I'm so spoiled by SilverFast. Vuescan has legions of fans and I know they are not wrong. It also has a reputation of wonderful tech support. 

Please do let me know how it works out for you, I am curious.

[ls_rbls]

++ Adding to the always valuable guidance of Gary,

As of last year, M1 chip Apple computers were introduced in MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro and the Mac mini... which of these models did your organization switched to?  

Each of these hardware may perform entirely different regardless of having the same M1 chip.

Also, Were the M1 processor computers shipped with macOS Monterrey already pre-installed or did they come with Mojave, Catalina or Big Sur pre-installed?

I am a bit confused because you've mentioned that you had "running macOS X Monterrey". Please correct me if I'm wrong on this macOS X term since I am still very new to Apple.

So I assume that you are referring to an upgrade of the prior operating systems(s) to Monterrey (which is also known as macOS 12 not macOS X (again correct me if I am wrong),  and macOS 11 for Big Sur respectively), in which case the most recent macOS X versions that I can think of are :

High Sierra (macOS 10.13)
Mojave (macOS 10.14)

Catalina (macOS 10.15)

I am making this distinction not to be a jerk but because there are very specific performance specs on how each of these OS's interact with the M1 chip in relation to other devices and also because of known memory leaks with early versions Monterrey.

If that would be the case, were you able to test the Brother MFC-J995DW scanning using any of  these earlier macOS X versions in those M1 chip computers? If yes, did it work OK before the upgrade to Monterrey?

Maybe reverting to Big Sur or an earlier macOS X version that supports M1 can make your life easier until Apple is able to address the issue in Monterrey (assuming that this may be a bug).

One last thought, were the old SSD's swaped from the Intel computers to the M1 computers as part of the upgrade? If yes, was Acrobat completely uninstalled before the upgrade?

In any case, you may also consider doing a firmware upgrade for the SSD's, or even checking if any of this could also be related to USB-C cable or ports (changing the cable, connecting to a different available port)... just guessing.

[gary_sc]

Excellent points ls_rbls!

[Pinyon_Jay]

I am sorry for any confusion my lack of knowledge caused. 

I appreciate your kind efforts to help me out of this confusion. Your comments were very interesting and educational. 

The computer which will not scan to Acrobat is new and came with Monterey installed on it. We then installed the latest Creative Cloud on it, the version that is compatible with Monterey and an M1 chip. The machine is running version 12.1 of Monterey.

We have an Intel Mac in the office which does not have Creative Cloud installed on it so I can't test whether Acrobat works on it. It can scan using Preview without any problem. I suspect it would work with Acrobat because the computer we no longer have did work with Acrobat for scanning, using Mojave and the CC version that worked on Mojave. 

The M1 computer can scan from other apps such as the native Brother scanning app and Preview, but not from Acrobat. All other Creative Cloud apps work fine and other parts of Acrobat work fine. 

The M1 computer will eventually produce a scan in Acrobat, after many error messages, but only in black and white. It hangs if we try to scan in color. 

Does this give you any clues as to why the Brother MFC-J995DW may refuse to work with Acrobat for scanning?

It appears we can't scan using Acrobat on the M1 computer so either have to use Preview, the Brother app or buy Vuescan if we intend to continue scanning using that machine. 

[ls_rbls]

What happens if you make Adobe PDF the default printing/scanning device?

Also, just for testing purposes, would you be able to uninstall Creative Cloud and only install an instance of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to check if this would do any different?

[Pinyon_Jay]

I am not sure how to make Acrobat the default printing device, but I will look into it, thank you.