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Scanner purchase


Stickman

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I am in the market for a scanner. The main - and perhaps only - use for the scanner is to scan a lot of old photographs I have. I have been looking at the Canon 676 scanner which does 600 X 1200 DPI. I'm fairly sure this will be adequate, but thought I'd check in here to see if anyone who knows more about this sort of thing...

 

 

 

Stick

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Go for the USB interface if possible, they are usually faster and many of them do not require a seperate power supply instead they are power supplied through the USB port. Anything other than flatbed would be a waste of money I think. Many newer scanners support direct scan/print, so if you have a decent printer you might want this too, as it makes it very easy to produce photocopies.

 

 

 

Best regards,

 

 

 

Danish30

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Don't forget in a pinch a digital camera can double as a scanner. To optimize, maximize the resolution, dial it in as close as focus allows and use a non-compressed format like tiff.

 

 

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The May 7, 2002 issue of PC Magazine had an article on how to make better scans. "Boost Your Scanning Skills".

 

 

 

http://www.pcmag.com/article/0,2997,s=1480&a=25240,00.asp

 

 

 

They mention some of the things that are and are not important. For example, the suggest scanning at a resolution of not more than 300dpi.

 

 

 

And what image editing adjustments to make after you do the scan.

 

 

 

This might hep you decide what's important when buying a scanner, such as bits or DPI.

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Just bought a USB scanner last week, some of the things that I was looking for was a copy button that hooks into your printer and with one touch of a button it will copy it. Also a USB port and XP compatable were important features as most computers only have on parellel port which the printer is usually in. 48 bit color is a bit better for photoshop but not necessary. have played with 42 bit and have not noticed a difference but the experts say 48. One thing you might consider especially if you use it as a copier is the scanner the same make as the printer. Have known people to have conflict problems with this regard. I had no use with a negative scanner so did not want to spend the 50% more

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Canon make good scanners in this range. This resolution is plenty good enough for scanning from prints.

 

If you want to scan directly from slides or negatives you need higher resolution, Epson has scanners with 1200x2400 which will be better for that purpose. A film scanner is of cause much better, but they are also much more expensive.

 

Scanners with parallell interface are outdated and should be avoided. USB is good and USB 2 is even better.

 

 

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Just make sure you are not using an older version of your OS

 

 

 

Scanner+M$95/98/Me=Crash Crash Crash

 

Scanner+OS8.6=Crash Crash Crash

 

 

 

Buy some ram.

 

 

 

Im told transparency scanners are mostly a novelty below $1000 and even then you can't do a lot for 35mm films.

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  • 2 weeks later...

i agree with other posters re: using your digital camera

 

if you have a good one then pictures of photos look as good as scanned images - I've even had such pictures published in journals, the quality being so good

 

 

 

 

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