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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?"
Just remember: "TWAIN" not "WIA" not "All-in-one"
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
Actually, All-in-one's are still sitting on and old reputation from when there were alot of crappy ones that liked to crap out after a year.
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.
For my money, I'd make sure it was SANE compatible. Screw TWAIN.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
AFAIK the quality is top, the price correct, and it plays very nice with any OS (espacially p'n'p under linux with xsane).
aurelien
I have a Microtek 6800 and a Fujitsu grayscale duplex scanner right now. I've owned Umax too and helped install HP scanners for others.
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.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
Are there any quasi-reputable sites (a la Tom's Hardware?) that have reviews on such things?
c ategory=consumer&words=scanner
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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
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I'm happy with my LIDE 20 from Canon. It's not high-res, but it's teeny and powered from the USB cable so you can easily store it when you're not using it. It's also lasted a lot longer than the old scanner I had (a HP 3400 that died after only a year.)
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I bought a random $50 scanner at OfficeMax. I use it with Finale (quite possibly the same thing that your sister is using). Works swell. For OCR, you don't need to go nuts.
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I've never gone wrong with canon products - I often heavily researched which camera and which printer to get, and ended up getting Canon both times. When I wanted to get a scanner, I went straight to Canon, and have not been disappointed.
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.
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I don't know anything about current models, and largely it will depend upon your sister's needs, budget, and limitations.
Here are a couple of sites to get you started: http://www.viewz.com/shoppingguide/scanner.shtml (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
Not any info on specific scanners in either of these, but should be a good jumping-off point to understanding the benchmarks.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
They're nice machines, but mine only lasted about a year and half (maybe two years). After which it needed a scanner bulb replacement and HP didn't offer the part for sale. Rather, one had to purchase the whole scanner assembly in order to fix the multifunction device. Worse, not even the print function works when the device reports a scanner error.
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.
Seconded. If the music you're scanning is remotely complex, the software will fuck it up completely. You'll spend more time fixing its mistakes than you would have just entering the music by hand or with a MIDI keyboard.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I picked up one of HP's multifunction PSC1315 print/scan/fax jobs (USB). Running FC3, the scanner Just Worked. Without doing anything beyond plugging it in and turning it on, it showed up in Gimp's acquire/scan dialog and successfully scanned images.
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.
-Uberhund
The point is that any modern scanner will scan a higher resolution than you will ever need. Unless, of course, you want to scan a penny and blow the image up poster size. The original poster is saying that he understands this and is (IMO rightfully) less concerned than the numbers game that many scanner manufacturers have played in the past and more concerned with image fidelity and quality.
I have a Canon LiDE 30 that I picked up for work (scanning patent documents). It's light, quiet, cheap (cost me $70), relatively quick, and draws power over the USB connection so it uses only that one cable. I use it primarily for black-and-white and greyscale images, but it's done color very nicely as well.
I believe the current model in this line is the LiDE 35, but all of the above should apply.
I don't think he meant to imply that the all-in-ones weren't necessarily twain, but that they sucked. I agree.
The point is that there are some scanners with a relatively high resolution that give results worse than relatively low res scanners do. Also, stores often advertise resolutions attained through interpolation which is about as informative as a PMPO speaker rating. (But I guess that goes without saying on Slashdot.)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Wow - the usual Slashdot STUPIDITY.
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).
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
http://www.usa.canon.com/html/conCprProductDetail. jsp?modelid=6623&item=6633§ion=10217?
$49.99
USB+power in one cable
Pretty good quality. Very small size.
Although DPI matters it isn't an over riding factor in quality. This is true for scanners, printers and digital cameras. Your assertion fails because you assume that all scanned/printed/imaged pixels are equal. They are not.
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
We sell high-end scanners (as in SCSI sheet-fed units designed to run all day) here at work. We got a new Fujitsu unit in, and the techs were setting it up in Windows 2000 (which is what the client was using.)
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.
That is so NOT the acronym. Actually, TWAIN isn't even an acronym at all. See this to be humbled a bit.
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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)
I am NaN
You will find good reviews of imaging hardware at http://www.steves-digicams.com/
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.
I prefer epson scanners especially for the Mac. HP has bloated unreliable software. I don't particularly like HP running in the background at start has they insist on doing. Epson has simple easy to use software that runs only when want it. It auto-identifies the document and it provides indexing for multiple scans so you only have to enter a filename once.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
For my collection of images scanned from antiquarian books I am now using an Epson E10000 3200dpi scanner that does A3+ (18"x12" roughly) and am very happy with it. I generally scan in Windows because the Linux Sane interface doesn't know how to focus the lens.
:-) For sheet music, though, larger than letter size is worth considering: there are several A3/tabloid scanners around. You will need at least 300dpi (native, not interpolated) for OCR, and possibly higher.
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.
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I like the one built into the boring Dell A960 which was made by Lexmark. I use it to scan sheet music as well and it does a way better job than the Epson and HP which I had as doorstops and now have been donated.
I've tried that in the past, on occasions when I haven't had immediate access to a scanner.
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.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Do *NOT* get UMAX. They don't provide free updates and support, and you absolutely cannot get most of their scanners to work under SANE/XSANE.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
What are you smoking?
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, which works out-of-the-box
Meh.
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.