Trying to scan a lot of photos on a flatbed scanner has exhausted my patience so I've decided to buy something with an auto feed and a straight paper path. The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 is favourite at the moment - but there are lots out there to choose from. Any recommendations?
I was bought an ix500 for a task at work. I loved it.
So much so that I bought one for myself, and have scanned about 60,000 pages with it. These were things from my office that I wanted to keep but didn't have room for when I 'retired'.
The software is excellent, not a low quality add-on like so much else tends to be.
I guess my only (small) reservation is that it scans only to PDF and JPEG
Have you considered photographing them? The set-up takes a while but then it's very quick. I use a greenhouse as a studio and choose a cloudy day. I've done thousands of archive pictures that way.
Actually 63,201 to date (just checked). And that's sheets, not sides - nearly twice that in sides, as it's auto duplex (scans both sides at once). It does 25 sheets/minute.
I think you mis-understand. Why would you need to lay them out? Just photograph them one at a time. Better if you can put the phone in a clamp to hold it in place. Be mutch faster than scanning. Be even better if you could borrow a proper camera, even a compact one. The lens/quality would be much better.
Yes but cameras take a photo in a fraction of a second whereas scanners only "see" a narrow strip (maybe one pixel wide) at any instant so they have to move the scanning head over the photo. This means that the time between pressing the button and being able to remove the photo and replace it with another one will be several seconds - maybe 20-30 for a large photo and high resolution. But the quality will probably be better - no geometric distortion and less chance of reflections off the surface of the photo.
The same moving head scanning applies to photocopiers where a light illuminates a narrow strip of the original which it focussed onto the drum as it rotates. However I remember the photocopier we had at university used a Xenon flash and exposed the whole of the original in a brief flash, which suggests that the photo-sensitive material was on a flat plate rather than a drum. Made damn good photocopies, too.
That is odd on most scanners they usually offer PNG lossless as well.
If you are going to the trouble of scanning them then 600dpi is worth it and if the original is in any way precious saved as a lossless format. If it is something rare an was a contact print off a large negative then an even higher resolution might be justified to capture all the detail.
JPEGs you need to decide on a quality and a chroma subsampling strategy. If the image contains fine black detail on blue or red then no subsampling will produce a visibly better result. JPEG Quality allows everything from nearly perfect rendition to surreal cubism at the other extreme. I'd recommend using highest quality for original scans.
Images will look better if downsampled to the native size of the display you intend to show them on Irfanview will automate that.
For moderate numbers of images a tripod and a decent camera will be faster, but you will need to do some post processing either way if you want to get the best representation of the orginals.
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