Help With Epson1200 Scanner

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I have an Epson1200 scanner and Epson Twain 5.53A.

The Twain doesn't seem to have a histogram, and I can't figure out how
to set the controls so I get the entire range of luminosity, but
spread out across the entire range of 0-255. If I understand the
available controls, they have a way to set the upper and lower (black
& white) cutoffs, but they're arbitrarily and fixed. That is, if you
set the lower cutoff to level 8 then if there's data below 8 it's all
blocked up as black, thus all data below 8 becomes 0 on the image it
returns. On the other hand if the first value on the low end begins
at 125 the returned image contains the empty area from 8 to 125. This
reduces the possible shades of gray it could have returned (the
luminosity range) by 45%.

My question is:
How do I get ALL of the tones available in the image, but spread
across the entire 255 range?

I can set the cutoffs to 0 & 255. Scan the image into PS. Determine
the lower and upper end points of data. Go back into the scanner, set
these cutoff and rescan the image, but what a PITA.

jim