Searching for a Decent Scanner? 425
Stumped about Scanners asks: "My little sister's scanner is acting up, so she's in the market for a new one. However, the software she wishes to use it with (some funkadelic 'music OCR' thing that lets you scan sheet music and transforms it automagically into MIDI files) claims that it doesn't work too well with HP scanners. And, truth be told, I've never known much about which scanners are good and which are crap. So, which scanners lately are decent? Which are crap? I know that DPI matters very little (just like it does in printers)-- it's quality that matters. Could the SlashDot community provide some info on which scanners (some from HP and some not from HP) are decent? Are there any quasi-reputable sites (a la Tom's Hardware?) that have reviews on such things?"
Hey boss! "The TWAIN!!" (Score:5, Informative)
Just remember: "TWAIN" not "WIA" not "All-in-one"
Re:Hey boss! "The TWAIN!!" (Score:4, Informative)
But now a days, plenty of companies make all in ones that are really nice pieces of equipment.... I'd specifically mention HP & Canon in this category myself... the laser ones anyway, no experience with the inkjet ones.
Re:Hey boss! "The TWAIN!!" (Score:1, Informative)
go EPSON (Score:5, Informative)
Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Epson and Microtek are probably the best 100-400 scanners. You get what you pay for if you go less than that.
I don't like Epson's drivers. They didn't give me as much control over the scan as the Microtek ones do. The Microtek drivers have a few annoyances, but are full-featured.
Overall, for a good average user, a $150 scanner from Microtek or Epson would be a good investment.
Tom's Hardware (Score:4, Informative)
Well, Tom's Hardware does have some scanner reviews. Although I don't know if they have the detail you're looking for:
http://www17.tomshardware.com/search/search.html?
http://www.tomshardware.com/consumer/20020327/ind
Canon LIDE 20 (Score:4, Informative)
Scanners (Score:2, Informative)
Canon (Score:4, Informative)
Combining my US$100 Canon scanner (cant remember the specific model; think it was a 4200F) and my Canon Pixma iP5000 printer (US$200), I can copy printed material and get very good reproductions.
If you want to go cheaper, they have a good selection of Photo scanners from $50 to $80.
If you have one of a few supported Canon printer models, you can get a 'scanner' cartridge that turns your printer into a sheet-feed scanner.
Basic information (Score:3, Informative)
Here are a couple of sites to get you started: http://www.viewz.com/shoppingguide/scanner.shtml [viewz.com] (not my favorite, but it's alright as far as learning the very basics. You just have to realize the site is aimed towards mom-and-pop).
here's the wikipedia entry:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scanner [wikipedia.org]
Not any info on specific scanners in either of these, but should be a good jumping-off point to understanding the benchmarks.
HP ScanJet 4600 (Score:3, Informative)
See thru top, small, light, cheap, reasonable quality. One of the cool things is you can scan 'anything'. If needed, you can flip it over or lift it up and scan the side of your face. Or any other 3D object.
Labels for the front edge buttons are printed on both faces of the lid.
HP 33xx series has a limited life span (Score:4, Informative)
Prior to this meltdown, I was pretty pleased with the unit. Getting it to play nice with OS X Panther was a royal bear, but that problem was fixed by the time that Panther had been out about a year.
I wanted to buy one of the Canon or Samsung models to replace it, but neither offered OS X drivers for their multifunction devices. If I didn't have such a limited amount of space, I would have bought a separate printer, copier, and scanner. Separately, they wouldn't have had much of a premium over all-in-one units.
I ended up buying another HP. Unless you want to spend a couple thousand on industrial grade machines, they're pretty much the only game in town for laser all-in-ones for OS X.
Re:Enter it yourself (Score:3, Informative)
HP PSC1315 multifunction (Score:2, Informative)
Can't speak about the quality, though. I don't really have any references. But it is nice to be able to copy stuff w/o running to the copy shop. And all in the same space as my previous HP inkjet.
The print function wasn't quite as easy to set up. There was a PSC1310 in FC3's printer list, which supposedly workd with the PSC1315. But I just went ahead and downloaded the PPD for the 1315 and told FC3 to use that. (Not much different than installing a driver on Windows.) Works well.
Re:DPI ? (Score:2, Informative)
Canon LIDE 30 (Score:5, Informative)
I believe the current model in this line is the LiDE 35, but all of the above should apply.
Re:Hey boss! "The TWAIN!!" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:DPI ? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Canon LIDE 30 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:DPI ? (Score:2, Informative)
Most scanners can scan at over 800 DPI, which is WAY higher than almost anybody needs for anything. 800DPI takes forever, and generates an enourmous image for an 8.5x11 sheet of paper (Think 60 Meg).
Canon LIDE (Score:2, Informative)
$49.99
USB+power in one cable
Pretty good quality. Very small size.
Re:DPI ? (Score:5, Informative)
A very good illustration of this is with color scanning. If you buy an expensive scanner its color accuracy should be quite good. If you buy a cheap scanner, not so much. Something that is common is getting dark blue for black.
Ah! You say, if you *really* care about the color accuracy (and who does?) then you just "apply a filter" in Photoshop. Not so fast -- if black comes in as dark blue, the question is what does dark blue come in as? if it also comes in as dark blue you just lost information and it can't be recovered.
Even if there is little information loss, "just" compressing of color space then it is something a bit beyond a simple filter. Color matching software is about the only way to deal with this problem, something Apple provides out of the box and is little used elsewhere.
My first scanner was a UMAX 1200 and with a scan target and some software I was able to create a color match profile for that scanner. The improvement in scan quality was very significant.
The short of it? It doesn't really matter if you scanner can go to 48000000 dpi if all of those "dots" are garbage. That's why getting a quality scanner is important. Scanning in a resolution higher than you will use is also a waste of time and storage, but that is another matter.
For digital cameras you get the same issues as with scanners. Ooo! Its 500 Mega Pixels! Means absolutely nothing if the reds are washed out, the blacks are blue, etc.
And printers are even more fun because people use different inks on different papers so color matching is even more hit and miss. But the original weakening of DPI as being useful to gauge printer output was when inkjet printer resolution started getting ramped up.
The problem is that the printer could place, say, 720 dots in an inch, but each dot was maybe 1/72 inch across (from memory -- at this point I don't remember the actual size of a dot on the inkjets as I don't use them). So all you got out of the 720 DPI was overly wet paper. (Well, it also allowed some smoothing of diagonals, but considering the bleeding problem with inkjets that point is of questionable value.)
Thoromyr
funny story... (Score:4, Informative)
It took them about an hour of putzing with SCSI drivers and trying different settings to get it to work 100% (getting the document feeder to work properly).
When they were done, I stuck my Knoppix 3.7 CD in the machine and started it up. I opened XSANE, and just started scanning. Knoppix saw the scanner, recognized that it had a document feeder, and I was able to start scanning with it immediately.
Re:Hey boss! "The TWAIN!!" (Score:3, Informative)
I will now proceed to save your life (Score:3, Informative)
Canon LiDE 500F (Score:2, Informative)
Canoscan 5200f works well with notation OCR soft (Score:3, Informative)
I've used it before with the package that comes with sibelius and it works a treat.
It's also a damn fine film scanner for doing hobby stuff (it's got FARE level 2 which will do some pretty impressive retouching to remove scratches and particles)
Review site and experience (Score:3, Informative)
I've personally used Apple, HP, Epson, Memorex (Artec), Microtek and Canon scanners. My personal scanner is a Canon CanoScan 8400F. There's probably a newer version.
The bundled software with this Canon does a wonderful job of descreening halftone images.
Last Christmas I gave my sister an Epson Perfection 2480 which included a partial-page feeder (business cards, checks, snapshots). The descreening on this one isn't as good and I wasn't able to associate the scanned images to Paint Shop Pro properly. However, the software does allow scanning multiple pages in a queue with a minimum of button clicks. Unless your sister is scanning single-page sheet music, she'll probably really benefit from this ability.
I don't know of any consumer-level sheet feeders. By that, I mean a scanner which retails for $100 or so won't have a sheet feeder option or accessory.
Another thing to consider is that scanners with their own power supply will yield higher contrast and brighter colors during the scan.
You should also look at the color of the pad on the underside of the cover. My Canon has a white cover. Yuck!! How Stupid!! Bright light will pass through paper which is being scanned and reflect back to the light sensors. It's far better to have a black pad so a ghost image of the opposite side of the paper is not detected. I have a full-sized hardcover book with a flat black cover which I use to block reflection and hold paper flat. Black construction paper won't work. The scanner's likght will bleach the paper.
A white pad does have some advantages but, in my opinion and experience, a black pad is far more useful.
Epson Scanners (Score:3, Informative)
It depend on your needs, as always (Score:3, Informative)
For your little sister you might want something rugged, depending on how little she is
A USB interface is the simplest, although if you have firewire on your computer that may be faster.
For graphic art work you need to be able to do colour calibration. For OCR, you probably will use grayscale most of the time. You can get some good solid greyscale sheet-fed scanners on ebay pretty cheaply, although make sure they're in your area: I wouldn't trust the shipping.
As others have said, look for TWAIN, and for scanners that work on multiple operating systems.
If you do a lot of scanning you'll need extra hard disk storage and a way to back it up, such as a DVD writer or a tape drive.
Re:Canon LIDE 30 (Score:2, Informative)
I am dead set against anything Umax now. They charged my Dad $30 for XP drivers for a scanner that had w2k drivers available for free. When the drivers came, they were a load of crap that required technical support and work-arounds to make them work properly. You'd think that if they were charging you for something that should have been free in the first place, what they provide should have been bullet-proof.
Do not buy Umax.
Searching for a Decent Scanner? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:go EPSON (Score:3, Informative)
I have an Epson Perfection 1260 flatbed scanner and it works perfectly, right out of the box under GNU/Linux. The only tricky part had to do with Epson's programming that resides inside the scanner--old SANE software would do something with the stepper motor that it would burn itself out if you scanned above 200DPI or so (if you kill your Epson Perfection 1260, [linuxhacker.org]it can be fixed [tn-home.de]). I figured that it's silly to call this a SANE bug because no device should allow any series of commands to burn itself out. I mention this only in the unlikely event that you plan to use the scanner on an old free software system (circa Red Hat GNU/Linux 9). If you're running some free software system that is more recent, ignore this caveat.
SANE's motor settings (since version 1.0.10) have been changed to not do what this scanner cannot handle correctly, and now you can use this scanner at whatever resolution it will support, plug and play.
Tried it, but ... (Score:3, Informative)
It's a passable "poor-man's" solution: it works, but the image tends to be geometrically distorted, with colour fringing around letters. Lighting can be a bit tricky, too. (These problems can be fixed with the right equipment, but scanners are cheap; certainly cheaper than the requisite photographic equipment.)
If you need a record in a hurry, it's an option. I'm not sure that the output would work well in most OCR software, though, and photos of photos lose a lot of quality.
Re:Hey boss! "The TWAIN!!" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Canon LiDE (Score:2, Informative)
I have a LiDE 30 and it works very well in Linux, in some ways better than with TWAIN in Windows.
After trying to make it work with SANE, I gave up and started using the very nice vuescan [hamrick.com], which works out-of-the-box
Re:funny story... (Score:4, Informative)
I guess I should have posted a link to begin with, duh. I just don't normally think of
fScanX [killerbytes.com]
Seeing a 5650 run at 60+ pages/minute can induce some serious gadget lust
Re:Hey boss! "The TWAIN!!" (Score:4, Informative)
175 upmoderated posts and not a lot of real info.
There are two common consumer level scanners. CCD based and CMOS. Both types are good for 99.9% of consumer requirements of resolution and colour accuracy. So I suppose that price, driver quality, and reliability come into play as discriminating factors in your purchase.
Most scanners are TWAIN compliant nowadays, and if you use vuescan then the software is not a major differentiator either.
CCD based is the traditional scanner as you know it. Every manufacturer uses it except Canon's LIDE based models. Works well and can scan in 3 dimensional objects and the like. Epson's models are quite good, UMAX are lower quality but generally cheaper. HP I haven't had any recent experience with, but they have been OK in the past.
CMOS based scanners are the basis of Canon's LIDE lineup. CMOS based systems were/are considered the holy grail of imaging systems because they are less power consuming and cheaper to manufacture than CCD based units. This is why Canon's scanners can be powered via USB and make decent portable units. Canon manages to compensate for CMOS' inherently noiser systems by a proprietary calibration technique. This is why most other manufacturers are behind Canon in CMOS based imagers for scanning. The biggest drawback to CMOS based scanners are the lack of focal depth in three dimensional or thicker objects. Since sheet music is flat a CMOS based system may good for your sister if she values portability. The lack of a wall wart is a bonus to me and reduces the tangle of cables as well.
Reliability wise, I've never had too much an issue with scanners unless they've been roughly transported or dropped.
Re:Well... (Score:1, Informative)