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?"

Comments

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 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.

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.

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!