Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
e x.html
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
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
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.)
Comment of the year
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.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
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.
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.
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.
[sig] 10 + 10 = 100 [/sig]
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.
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.