Searching for a Decent Scanner?

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?"

Add to Question

[rknop]

Which ones are well-supported by SANE, so us Linux (etc.) users can use it?

I generally find that the models on the shelf in CompUSA and the like are not supported by SANE (at least the ones that are on the less expensive end). Meanwhile, the ones that SANE says they support are all more than a month or two old. I don't know why so much of the computer industry feels the need to put out a new model number with essentially the same functionality every couple of months, but printers and scanners in particular seem to suffer from that. It makes it difficult for those of us using free drivers to keep up with.

What's a good, low-end, *current* scanner that you can get that works with SANE?

-Rob

Enter it yourself

[ericdano]

Being a professional musician myself, I have tried a lot of these software scanning solutions. Basically, it's easier and faster to just enter scores into a sequencer (like Digital Performer [motu.com] than to deal with the corrections you have to make when dealing with these music to midi scanners.

Save yourself time and money. Get a good keyboard, synth module, and a sequencer and do it that way. Scanning it to midi just doesn't ever work right.

HP

[oopsyoubrokeit]

I happen to be very happy with most of HP's products. They make some inexpensive scanners that work very well for OCR and music OCR scanning. My little brother and his music classes used $79 HP scanners with music OCR software on handwritten sheets and it worked great.

I would think that it is more the OCR software that would have more of an impact on the quality of the output of music to the computer.

Just my 2 pennies.

digital camera

[Jeffrey Baker]

If you have a digital camera, try that instead. Many digital cameras, even middle-of-the-line ones like a Powershot S400 or similar, are perfectly good replacements for document scanners, and normally much, much faster.

DPI ?

[bushboy]

Quote: <i> I know that DPI matters very little (just like it does in printers)-- it's quality that matters. </i>

Well, you know wrong.

DPI is to all intents and purposes, the same as "resolution" which is not something you do at New Years.

If you want to scan something, the more of it's surface you can scan, the better.

So yeah, I'd say it DOES matter.

Re:Add to Question

[Feyr]

i have an old scsi UMAX scanner here that's a serious pain in the ass (read: almost impossible) to get working in windows according to cow-workers. SANE picked it up on the first try, and the quality is even good!

feyr my SANE-ity

Re:Google

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Much more with reality- from Google you get paid reviews. From slashdot you get user reviews. For any geek, the second is much more valuable because the first is just marketing.

Re:Google

[Surt]

You've broken the google rule: if you refer the person to google for their answer, you have to prove google can find the answer by providing the search criteria (and your search criteria better find the right answer, or you'll get flamed heavily).

Re:Hey boss! "The TWAIN!!"

[Anonymous Coward]

The word TWAIN is from Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" - "...and never the twain shall meet...", reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry "Technology Without An Interesting Name" continues to haunt the standard. "

Re:HP's are bad because they're junk.

[msaulters]

Anyway, DON'T BUY HP!!

I'm so sad that I have to agree with this. I remember how I used to swear by HP. 10 to 15 years ago, they couldn't be beat. Then they completely changed. Everything they put out became disposable and cheap. Their inkjet printers are the strongest example of how they went wrong. I have a friend who's still using his deskjet 500, after nearly 15 years. But in the mid-90's, they started selling not printers, but disposable ink-cartridge caddies. Even the cartridges were junk. You couldn't print 1/4 of the pages advertised before they gummed up so bad they were useless. I haven't bought an HP product in years.

Another reason they aren't worth a crap is their shitty driver support. You buy an HP workstation-class machine from the late 90's early 00's, and you get no support for win98, because it's a home O/S. They only have 2K drivers. Or you buy a 'home/home office' variety from that period, and there's no Win 2K drivers. This extended to their 'internet keyboards' too, which was the last HP item I ever bought.

Then they bought up Compaq, and even their server line now has issues. Ever tried to use their mounting rails? I never thought, back in the 90's that I'd pick a Dell server over HP/Compaq and be able to make the decision merely on the basis of their racks and rails!

Did some testing once

[thrill12]

Using an ordinary scanner, I scanned something in full colour, and compared that with the same (photograph) scanned in full color using the primary colors and combining those afterwards. I got very clear differences in the final scan when I combined the R+G+B channels with Photoshop to a full-color photo. The combined (3-pass) RGB channel scan produced at least 2 times more resolution than the (1-pass) full-color scan.
 
If you want very good color reproductions, try it sometimes - could prove interesting - ofcourse your scanner does have to support scanning separate RGB channels...

Re:Google

[BRTB]

Yeah, but epinions probably won't give you reviews based on optics quality, software/driver interfaces, repairability, or alternate-OS support... unless you're looking for recommendations based on things like "I like the color, not too beige but not grey either" or "it was so hard to install, I couldn't find my BSU[sic] ports anywhere" as I've seen on reviews for several other devices.

Canon LiDE

[dieman]

Yeah, they don't work with linux, but the Windows support is good and its powered off of USB.

I've also had them make copies of photos that had supposed 'protection' against copying (ie: watermark that would show up when scanned). Never saw the watermark, must be that the led-based tech in the canon product foils that method. :)

Canon LiDE 60

[HokieVT]

FWIW I recently purchased a Canon LiDE 60. It's affordable and works great. It's powered by USB so there's no need for yet another power brick and it's also able to sit vertically and take up a ton less desk space.

Re:Did some testing once

[Limecron]

Or you can buy a set of red, green and blue gels and take 3 shots in B&W. Perhaps even mod the scanner to be able to slip them in without moving the object being scanned.

Or if the scanner's lamps are LED, mod it to use red, green and blue LEDs on an external switch of some sort.

That actually sounds like an interesting project. Hmm...

Re:digital camera

[Jeffrey Baker]

Oh no, you're right! It might take two minutes if I do it manually, so it's right out. Man you make a persuasive argument.

A 100-image-per-minute duplex scanner costs $1200 or more and has no other uses. A digital camera that could perform the work mentioned in the article might cost $400-600 and has plenty of uses besides.

By the way, I can easily do 100 images per minute with my digital camera scanning. You just set all the paper up in a stack on a music stand or other convenient place, fix the white balance, focus, and exposure on your camera (so you don't waste time on auto-focus and auto-exposure for each shot), and start snapping away. All you have to do is discard the top sheet after every frame, and it goes very quickly.

"Music OCR" terminology confusing

[Peachy]

Not to be confused with the old HP ScanJet models which themselves would play a tune [winterwolf.co.uk] using their stepper motor.

Re:Add to Question

[rudedog]

Nearly any epson scanner will work very well with Sane. I seem to recall reading somewhere that Epson provides the Sane project with any information they need to make a driver. I recently bought a Perfection 2480 Photo and it worked almost as soon as I plugged it in. All I had to do was extract the firmware from the install CD.

Re:Enter it yourself

[Clod9]

>Save yourself time and money. Get a good keyboard, synth module, and a sequencer

Maybe you haven't looked at the price of scanners lately? Buying all that other gear won't save any money. She already has the software.

It will probably save a lot of time, except if his sister: (1) is not a skilled keyboard musician, (2) does not sight-read, and (3) the music she's scanning is not overly complex, then the software conversion can save time. I speak from experience, as a geek who has worked with studio musicians and in the publishing arena -- if a sight-reading musician is available, they'll play the music faster and more accurately than any scanning process. But anyone who can't sight-read and just has the occasional bunch of music to convert to MIDI for some purpose may do well with a scanner.

crappy story...

[midnighttoadstool]

That's a lovely story, with no substance. The trouble with stories of this kind is that they don't test like for like. Windows 2000 is 6 years old, and has barely had any feature updates (USB2 is just about the only one). Further, when it comes to external devices Microsoft's policy is to let the manufacturer produce the driver, which may result in a crappy driver, as describe [by parent] but is alot more sensible (think about it) and usually more flexible than the linux half-baked equivalent produced by people who aren't good enough to get adequate satisfation from the their day jobs. Ok, ok, so the last statment was unfair and anti-social; I reluctantly withdraw it. If Fujitsu produce crappy drivers for their scanners then sack the person responsible for buying it, and stop blaming Microsoft.

Re:Enter it yourself

[ericdano]

1 and 2 are solved by a thing called STEP ENTRY. Easy, simple, fast.

3 is doubtful. I couldn't get any of the scanning software I have (Scoreperfect I think its called, but I don't remember) to do a simple sheet from Green Day.

Re:DPI ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow...your ignorance is stunning!

I've worked with OCR software quite a bit, and if you do enough testing, you see that as DPI goes up from, say, 100 DPI (on 10 point type) upwards, so does your quality. Amazingly, when you get above 400 to 600 DPI, quality starts DROPPING. Your OCR software grinds away at the images (for a longer time, because there are more pixels to analyze), and excessive DPI actually hurts the process, and your OCR accuracy will drop.

Don't take my word for it, DO IT. You'll see what I mean, so as has been said by many, YMMV, but generally more than 400-600 DPI will just waste time and resources. I know, Mom doesn't care how much time you spend in her basement, but to most of us, time IS money.

And BTW, the complexity of the piece has nothing to do with the DPI you need, each note will be several score (sorry, couldn't help the pun!) pixels in size, more than enough to be recognized. If there are more notes, it will just take a bit longer to process the image. If the notes are printed SMALLER, then you raise your DPI a bit, but not for the number of discrete characters on a page.

Also, your last revelation is something you need to share with all the OCR vendors: To increase accuracy, just up your DPI! While it is true that too low a resolution will hurt quaity, beyond a certain point, you're just throwing excess data at the software, and only succeeding in slowing it down to look at all those pixels.

Re:How about for Linux?

[Pete]

I've used Rosegarden [rosegardenmusic.com] to enter a few pieces of music, and it's pretty good. I tend to focus more on tweaking the output to look exactly the way I want, and Rosegarden's output to Lilypond [lilypond.org] needed a fair bit of tweaking. Well, rewriting. :-)

There's probably a chance that Rosegarden's export to MUP [arkkra.com] or PMX [icking-music-archive.org] or (various other options) works better. I've only recently started using Lilypond (after using MusixTeX for a while), so I'm probably not doing things in the most efficient way.

As mentioned by the AC, NoteEdit [berlios.de] looks like a pretty good option too, though I haven't tried it myself. Hmmm... (reading features)... maybe I should. :)