Scanners - What to Choose
 

Beloved has decided that she wants to buy me a scanner for Christmas and, wise girl, has decided to tell me first so that she doesn't buy the wrong thing. However, while I perhaps know a little more than her, I don't know a great deal. I have just spent an hour looking at a search here and can't find an answer to my questions. My useage would be the occasional document (which I assume any modern scanner will do adequetly) and Photographs (colour prints). Now what do I need ? What advantage is Negative scanning to me. I have no need for slide scanning due to the absence of slides:D
does gloss or matt print make any difference?
I welcome any input

Here are four links to products that cover the price range from cheap to "ouch"

HP at £100

Visioneer at £50

£250 HP does negatives

Good Epson compromise but £200

Although its fun to have a transparency adapter, don't expect too much from it. The grain always looks worse. Negative scanning is OK with a good software that will reverse the image.

For illustrations from magazines etc, see if you can get a package that will allow "descreening"; that is, it compensates for the patterns of dots that make up the pictures. When these are scanned, you get a moiré pattern unless you "descreen" them.

Matt photos don't scan very well. They tend to scatter the reflected light. Best is gloss.

Adobe Photshop Elements Ver 2.0 is excellent software for editing the results. There are others.

You will have found an excellent way of losing hours and hours of your spare time!

To add the excellent advice above:

Why pay more than the basic budget model? I would only do this if the more expensive model offered significantly more - covering your needs and your needs alone. We don't meet in pubs fighting over bragging rights concerning scanners and printers................

I'd buy a more expensive one if I knew I'd be scanning pages from books - a more complex and versatile hinge mechanism is needed.

I'd pay more for speed - usb 2 or firewire.

I'd pay a little more if it comes with Adobe's excellent Photoshop Elements - the disk covers both PC and Mac.

I wouldn't pay more for slide/negative scanning - if you have a large library of negs and trannies a purpose made scanner is vastly superior but comes in at around the 400 quid mark. This is buttons compared to your outlay on camera[s] and film stock - why ruin the quality while digitising them?

I wouldn't pay for a document feeder.

For the average and wise user you're far better off with a basic model and spend the rest on inkjet cartridges and photo quality paper. Running costs kill not buying the hardware.

Regards
Rob

PS Kodak has just bought Scitex - a name well known to the graphics aware - scanning products at the Rolls Royce end of the market. I'd expect them to be wanting to expand the sales base by putting high end scanners into the photo processing market rather than just reprographics. I'd imagine seeing offers to scan and digitise your old film archive at very high quality in the next year or so. Kodak have had a taste of the potential with their link to Mac software. Click one button and you can order not just prints but entire bound photo albums.

Well I think I can add a worthwhile piece here.

I have used Epson printers for several years. Never thought I would change my mind to buy something else but I did. Yes I did ;)

A few weeks ago I bought the HP all-in-one 2175. All in one means that you have a scanner, a printer and copier. It is just superb.

The quality of the printing is terrific. You can, by adding a photo cartridge, produce even more brilliant pictures than the brilliant pictures it does anyway - and quite quickly too.

Then, and here is the good bit. It has FOUR different slots for digital camera cards. The computer then offers you different ways to save them print them or whatever. All via the software. And I am still finding things this machine will do that I didn't know about. HP for me and I don't mean sauce ;)

Oh yeah the cost. I paid £158 and I got a £100 back when I sold my printer and scanner and camera reader.

Agree with Rob by the way. Slide accessories are very expensive if you don't have a lot of slides!

I've long been a fan of HP products, having owned four over the years. Current machine is an HP psc 950 'All-in-One', an earlier model similar to the HP2175, and it has been excellent.

My only reservation about HP's current models concerns the capacity of the ink cartridges - now typically only about 17ml. Cartridges for earlier HP printers hold about 40ml of ink, but cost about the same.

Currently using a USB 2.0 Canon LIDE 50, not expensive but extremely good.

Wod

Wayne Fulton's Scantips site is an excellent resource for advice on scanning.

Cheers

I also recently invested in a Canon Lide 50, which works a treat with documents and photo's. A big plus point is that it needs no external power (it draws it from the USB port). NB - this may also be a -ve if you already have a lot of power hungry peripherals on your PC. Also, it can be used vertically, saving some desk space, but requiring some balancing skills. I paid around 70GBP.

Not sure what the PC bundled PC software is like - but the Photo Editing package is in OS9 and a pain if you're on OSX.

9/10.

Thank you all for your responses and particularly the links, which have provided a new knowledge base as I have had to research all sorts of stuff that I had no previous knowledge of eg. usb 2.0

The Decision is almost made !

Couple of points to watch:

1. Some of the HP scanners I've used take up to a minute after "pressing go" before anything happens. That may be part of the "Intelligent Scanning Software" that works out what to do - and takes an age doing it. Seems to be a function of the "three buttons" feature.

My old clunker SCSI Agfa (several years obsolete) is very fast by comparison. Click "scan" in Paint Shop Pro or MS Word, and the scanner head starts moving instantly.

2. If you want to scan in text (OCR), then expect to pay a fair amount for capable software. The cheap end of the market gets very frustrating if you do much OCR.

Keef, I have an old clunker too that takes a while to warm up. :)

But turning to my old scanner, its a SCSI Umax Powerlook II and it too takes a while to spring to life. The wait is accompanied by a message that the scanner is "Warming up". This refers to the strip light bulb. Maybe this is the same with yours.