Have a scanner? Any scanner? You should probably use Vuescan!

If you have a scanner - really, just about any scanner (barring professional or exotic things like Imacon/Aztec/Creo etc) - then you should use Vuescan.

Vuescan supports just about every film and flatbed scanner under the sun (see https://www.hamrick.com/vuesca...) - including many, many scanners that are no longer supported by their makers in recent operating systems.  This includes both film scanners and flatbed/document scanners.  More often than not, Vuescan's drivers will be more reliable than the OEM drivers.

For each of these scanners, Vuescan provides a uniform user interface.  Learn Vuescan just once, and you will likely be able to use it for the rest of your life!  We first started using it in the early 2000s and have used it on and off with various machines for the last 20 years.  So don't just throw out your older scanner - God only knows the world doesn't need any more tech waste - but extend it's useful life by years and years, just by using Vuescan.

Vuescan is fantastic value - less than $100 for even the fullest featured version.  Vuescan is very powerful - once you've learned to use it, you should generally be able to easily out-perform the rubbish software that comes with scanners (I'm looking at you 'Epson Scan'!).  It's constantly updated - and not just minor updates, but genuinely useful ones (e.g. they have just added scanning to PDF editing features for multi-page PDFs, etc).

You can use it to scan film, documents, and more exotic things like using inverting negatives to positives.  It's has powerful batch scanning capabilities, and can even make excellent ICC profiles for your scanner (using IT8 targets).  

Other than perhaps Directory Opus (legendary Windows file manager) - I can't think of a piece of software as useful and as good value as Vuescan.  

Visit the Vuescan Homepage to find out more or read our recently published Vuescan Review.