So today I lashed out on a fancy new all-in-one multifunction printer/scanner/copier. I settled on the Epson TX700W wireless version, for AUD275.00. I made sure it said on the box that it was compatible with Macintosh OS X. Cool.

Set up was a breeze. Hooked it up to the router, threw in the cartidges, and was printing in minutes. Then why are Epson a bunch of douchebags, I hear you ask? Try doing a scan from you Mac on it, and you'll run into the worst set of instructions you ever encountered.

Every time I tried to start a scan from photoshop, or open Epson's Scan app, I got the ubiquitous "Epson Scan could not start", and the app crashes. I downloaded a bunch of different drivers, no dice. Re-installed everything, still no love.

Turns out and note - this isn't in ANY of the documentation or help files (on or off-line), that you need to go into your /Applications/Utilities folder and look for an app called "Epson Scan Settings", that bizarrely enough isn't installed in the /Applications/Epson folder with all the other dependencies. Running this still results in the "Epson Scan could not be started", but the scan settings app itself will still start.

I then chose the "network" radio button, clicked 'add', and had to enter the IP address of the printer manually, as searching didn't find it. In my case it was 10.1.1.4. Once this was done, I could scan till the cows came home.

My beef is that this obscure setup procedure wasn't mentioned in the documentation or help anywhere, and I wasted several hours of my time scouring the web till I found a reference to it. Good work Epson...douchebags.