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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
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
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.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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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.)
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
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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
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.