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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.
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
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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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.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
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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.
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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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.
Uh, can somebody explain to me why they consider all-in-oners not to be TWAIN compatible? TWAIN is after all a software protocol, and my wife's Epson scanner/printer/copier/fax seems to be TWAIN compatible (in that I can hook up to it's driver as a TWAIN source in Paint Shop Pro and get a picture back).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
the Radio Shack Pro-89.
I can easily program all of my favorite drivers in in no time. But the Bearcats can be programmed for you at the track at the Race-Scan trucks.
This
Quote: I know that DPI matters very little (just like it does in printers)-- it's quality that matters.
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.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
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.
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.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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. "
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.
Dear Ask Slashdot, I have a report for school. Where can I find pictures of dinosaurs?
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
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'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!
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
I don't think he meant to imply that the all-in-ones weren't necessarily twain, but that they sucked. I agree.
How about a radio frequency scanner which scans whatever music is playing and transcribes it to sheet music?
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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...
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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.
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.
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.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
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.
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.
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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we had to use a pen on staff paper...in the snow...up hill....both ways....
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Because /. has that 8-hour interrogation to prove who you really are so no marketing geeks ever get on here and try to pretend that they are unbiased users.
/. doesn't let the "marketing geeks" have any more say than the "unbiased users"- thus letting a ton of people jump on the marketing geek's posts with disagreements and bad reviews. The bad reviews that you'd never see on a marketing site like ZDNet or Tom's Hardware.
No, because
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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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
If you know anything about scanners you'll know that part of it is just a big camera. The parent is obviously correct that the optics quality is very important. Just look at any cheap 35mm film camera compared to an expensive 35mm camera. They both have the same "resolution" because they can use the same film. The optics of the cheap camera are probbably crappy poorly "ground" plastic lenses, while the expensive camera likely has very high quality well ground glass (or whatever ueber-optics material they're using these days).
AccountKiller
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.
Not to be confused with the old HP ScanJet models which themselves would play a tune using their stepper motor.
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.
Um. I think that is the point. TWAIN is not an acronym, even thought it is capitalized as though it is one. To me, calling it the "Technology without an interesting name" is perfectly acceptable. Can you imagine of most of our protocols were named by picking some vaguely related word in literature somewhere?
The joke, and it IS a joke, gets a good laugh at presentations to the uniformed and often causes them to go read up on the subject (something it is increasingly hard to get decision makers to do).
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.
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.
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
I've used Rosegarden 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 needed a fair bit of tweaking. Well, rewriting. :-)
There's probably a chance that Rosegarden's export to MUP or PMX 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 looks like a pretty good option too, though I haven't tried it myself. Hmmm... (reading features)... maybe I should. :)
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.