To answer this question fully, it's first important to understand what WIA and TWAIN are and are not

TWAIN

The TWAIN protocol, overseen by the TWAIN working group, covers scanner drivers, The TWAIN source manager, and applications (API).

When you install a valid TWAIN driver for your scanner, you're installing the low-level drivers that let the hardware and computer communicate. The first time you install a TWAIN driver, if your system does not have the TWAIN source manager, that is also installed. Our Twain aware components (DotTwain for Desktop scanning, and WingScan / WebCapture for web scanning) provide a convenient way for a .NET / .NET Framework developer working in C# or VB .NET to negotiate listing, opening, acquiring from and closing up communications with the TWAIN source manager. - In short, to allow you to build TWAIN scanning into your application without having to dig down into the murky Win32 TWAIN source manager world.

WIA

WIA stands for  Windows Image Acquisition. It is designed to try and treat scanner devices as a sort of "CLASS". In effect, it attempts to emulate TWAIN drivers. Microsoft WIA versions of Scanners can show up in the TWAIN source manager, and TWAIN will attempt to communicate with them. However, how well this works (or more often how poorly) is highly variable.

Atalasoft and WIA

Our DotTwain and WingScan (Web Capture) are TWAIN SDKs. They are designed to operate correctly with the TWAIN source manager and thus provide a robust scanning solution for TWAIN scanners. When a scanner shows up as WIA, there is a far greater chance of running into issues while scanning. If you're running into an issue with a scanner that shows as a WIA device, the best practice is to go get the full TWAIN driver for the scanner and install that and use the scanner via the official TWAIN driver interface.

However, officially: Atalasoft does not have a WIA scanning component.

What does this mean? 

WIA provides a TWAIN compatibility layer that allows TWAIN enabled applications to use WIA drivers for image acquisition. There are specific features WIA provides for improved camera support that can’t be accessed through TWAIN, and if you have issues using a scanner via WIA, it is advisable to install and use a proper TWAIN driver. Issues with WIA driver incompatibilities will generally be unsupported by Atalasoft as our tools are TWAIN components.

What if I REALLY want to use the WIA provided version of my scanner driver?

If you have WIA devices on your system, but they simply do not show up when using ShowSelectSource(), you can try the following:

In a static constructor, before ANY Atalasoft scanning objects are called/initialized, add

Atalasoft.Twain.TwainManager.ForceTwain1xBehavior = true;

(in VB, this would be inside of a Shared Sub New)

Original Article

Q10068 - FAQ: Does Atalasoft Have a WIA Scanning Component?

Last Update

2025-12-22 - TD