X-post replacement flatbed scanner?

[David WE Roberts]

Just starting out looking because my old scanner was for a Win2K system and my All-in-1 Lexmark is not really supported after XP.

So a couple of initial impressions from a quick Google - looking for advice from scanner users/buyers.

(1) The prices (around £60) are higher than I expected in a mature market.

(2) All-in-1 printers with a flat bed scanner seem to be a lot cheaper (£25) but the resolution is 1200 dpi instead of 2400/4800 dpi. However if they can offer a printer and a scanner then probably they are subsidising the whole thing on the expected future sale of ink.

So anyone know of either a cheap scanner - sub £30 - or a reasonably priced All-in-1 with a higher resolution.

The results of someone elses research could save me a long and painful Google session :-)

Cheers

Dave R

[The Natural Philosopher]

I have to say that my need for a scanner became almost zilch after I got a DSLR.

with a decent lens, that copies printed material much faster.

I only use the scanner now for copying scale drawings.

[David WE Roberts]

Just checking out my Agfa SnapScan e50 from2001. That scans at 1200*2400 so £60 scanners now have about double that resolution. For over 10 years development that isn't much increase in resolution! It still beats the All-in-1 resolution. Given the enormous advances in electronics and sensors why has the scanner market not advanced more?

[newshound]

I'm very happy with my dedicated Canon Lide 200 which isn't their entry level scanner. I wouldn't want an all in one because laser printers (even colour) are cheap now and I never had anything but trouble out of wet ink printers.

[John Rumm]

You have neglected to tell us the important stuff alas... like what you want it for?

Scanning positives or transparencies?

What volume of scanning?

How you want it to communicate with your computer (i.e. you want it on a network with the ability to scan directly to email or a PDF and save it in a shared folder, or are you happy with something hanging off a USB port that you drive manually from the PC)?

What quality you need? Making quick photocopies, OCRing the odd document, is a different requirement from archival quality work for photographs etc.

[David WE Roberts]

I don't treally want another printer at the moment as our trusty HP Deskjet

990 cxi does adequate double sided printing. I would only consider an All-in-1 if it had a scanner as good as a stand alone scanner at a better price.

Looking at Amazon the Canon Lide 210 is about £70 including delivery but doesn't seem to have a photo scanning option. The Epson Perfection V33 is about the same price and listed as a photo scanner. However I am still trying to establish if it has a top light and will scan negatives or the 'photo scanner' is just a bit of fluff. My old Agfa has a negative carrier and a top light. I forsee some scanning using Linux either native or with VMWare.

Oh, and my Win2K portable (which has all the software for the scanner) ran O.K. yesterday, blue screened on closedown, and is now checking the disc and making disturbing clacking sounds as if there are a lot of bad sectors being corrected or as if the drive is just knackered.

Could be a candidate for a spare drive and an XP build if I can find XP drivers for the hardware - but why now when I need to scan something urgently?

Grump.

Davev R

[David WE Roberts]

Got me bang to rights Guvnor :-)

Initial requirements - scanning A4 documents to save as original images (not OCR). Happy to just scan to file, although most come with an app to go straight to email or printer. Happy with USB but Firewire is also O.K. (not that I expect a FireWire scanner). Optional extra is a negative carrier with backlight. [Got one on my Agfa but never used it] Wireless O.K. but not worth any extra cost. Don't think I need archival quality for photos - just decent quality (whatever that is).

I'm giving the Agfa a go on Ubuntu to see how easy it is to use (initially via VMWare but prepared to go native if it turns out easier). Given that you can spend £100 on a trolley of groceries then my price expectations may well be 10 years out of date, and £10 a year over 10 years for a reasonable scanner doesn't seem much.

Cheers

Dave R

[Huge]

If your old scanner works under XP (assuming I've followed the thread properly) why not just run XP in a virtual machine hosted on whatever you like. I run XP under Ubuntu inside a VirtualBox for my scanner - I gave up trying to get the Ubuntu scanning software to work.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Check if Vuescan willl support your old one.

[Dave]

David WE Roberts pretended :

I've got an Epson Stylus Office BX525WD all-in-one printer and the scanner resolution is 2400x2400, cost me £59 at Staples a while back.

Interestingly though, back in 2000 I did an HNC in computing at Blackpool & The Fylde College and I always remember the lecturers saying to scan low and print high, resolution-wise - presumably because scanning at high res created bigger file sizes and storage then wasn't as cheap or as prevalent as it is now.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

The market for scanners has been falling off, as more people have already scanned their negatives (where the neg scanning on a flatbed was a viable and cheaper alternative to either having them done on a paid-for basis, or buying a dedicated neg scanner), so the numbers produced have lessened, along with R&D money.

Some of the higher-end flatbed scanners are capable of bloody good results, but if I had hundreds or thousands of 35mm slides to digitise, I'd be making up a slide copier arrangment on a 10Mp dSLR. Even now, I only use my scanners for the odd document, but mainly for large and medium format negs - an old Epson 2450 does great for LF, an Epson 4490 is excellent for MF.

Tip: Don't believe the makers' claims about ultimate resolution; it is, and always has been, bullshit. Things HAVE got better, but the actual real useable resolution isn't as high as they claim.

[David WE Roberts]

Certainly works well with the semi-pro SCSI scanner I set up for a friend. Still it does cost around £27 depending on the exchange rate so if I could get a newer, higher resolution scanner for not much more the newer kit might be a better option. A potentially good half way house between using Ubuntu with my old scanner and spending around £80 for a better resolution new one.

[stuart noble]

Doesn't the flash light bounce off a glossy finish? It certainly does with my non-slr

[Man at B&Q]

In resolution terms, anything you buy will be overkill for scanning prints and pretty dire for transparencies.

MBQ

[The Natural Philosopher]

don't use flash then

[John Rumm]

How much more than "enough" is worth having? The top end output of a Linotronic typesetter is about 2500 dpi, and that will only ever be used for the highest quality glossy repro work. Most common stuff will be printed at 1300 lines per inch or less. So a modern scanner should be able to capture pretty much all the information that is there in anything printed you are likely to find. Most common photographic paper is unlikely to exceed that in real usable resolution.

High resolution scanning only really becomes important for scanning small transparencies (e.g. 35mm slides or film) but even then 3000 spi will get you more image size than you will need in many situations.

For photographic quality there are other factors that matter far more than raw resolution. The ability to capture a decent dynamic range (the so called D-MAX) of a scanner, and also the maximum colour depth will have more impact than just raw pixels.

Its advanced in other ways. Prices have come down, and sophistication of the software has increased with more options to scan to multiple formats and email etc without the need of a third party package. Less profound stuff like the ability to scan to facebook etc is also probably increasingly common.

D-Max has improved on better scanners. 48 bit colour is not uncommon, and 16 bit greyscale as well.

The other thing that separates out decent scanners is that they are very fast and quiet, low end ones can still sound like a grinder mincing your photo!

[David WE Roberts]

Wise words. I started down the Ubuntu route then found that I would have to install the firmware to be uploaded to the scanner. The firmware is wrapped in a '.exe' file for a Windows installer. No way I'm letting that near my Vista or W7 install as it is for XP. So a touch of hole in my bucket syndrome. I have so far held off from an XP virtual machine but I'm installing one now on the W7 machine - just doing the downloading of 116 essential updates. Presumably tranche #1 of many. Slightly scary seeing the traditional XP desktop background and messages saying how this will be better and faster than any previous operating system :-) However I can then download the latest XP software and drivers for the scanner - which in turn will provide me with the firmware to integrate into Ubuntu if I can be arsed. Loads of stuff to do, though, including AV install.

This highlights a shortcoming of SANE on Ubuntu. Most scanners just work (I had my son's cheap and nasty scanner up and running in no time but it is very nasty - no proper light seal around the edges so light pollution on the scan. Presumably this is a dumb scanne which doesn't need firmware uploading. It would be nice to have a firmware installer accompanying SANE where all you have to do is find the binary aand SANE will install it for you and set up all the configuration files etc. I can read 'man' pages, edit configuration file, create symbolic links etc. but these days of plug and play and automatic driver install this is a very clunky way to go about things and probably very hard for people who have not been Unix system admins in the past.

I will say that XP installing on an SSD using 2 of 4 cores of an i5-2500k and 1Gb of memory seems to be flying along :-)

{pause for much software installing}

XP thinks it is up to date, Avast installed, Firefox and Chrome installed, LibreOffice downloading, Agfa SnapScan installed and tested. Using Paint reminds me of how low the functionality was under XP :-(

Cheers

Dave R

[chrisj.doran%proemail.co.uk]

In what way? Which model? My X2350 works OK on Windows 7. I can't remember the safe place where I put the install disk, so had to download a driver, which doesn't include their "imaging studio", but scanning works with utilities such as IrfanView, and OCR with FreeOCR.

I've more-or-less abandoned its printer, as it never fed paper reliably, the colours were always washed out, it didn't given may prints per cartridge, the cost of kosher ones is close to that of a new printer, and it detects and rejects refills after a few prints.

Chris

[Tony Houghton]

Sometimes these sorts of exes are self-extracting archives based on zip or rar format etc and they can be unpacked in Linux just as if they were plain archives.

[BartC]

I found a camera doesn't do printed documents very well. You get uneven lighting, and a full-colour image which is awkward to convert to 2-level black&white because the threshold varies across the page.

Resolution over the document would be poor too; a 1200dpi scanner ought to use some 140Mpixels for an A4 page, although I didn't get that far.

But maybe your camera is more expensive...