The boss tells me to go out and buy a scanner “and make sure it’s a good one!”
I’ve never even priced one before. What features do I look for? Any brands I should specially consider or steer away from? Are most XP compatible? Anything else I need to know?
Almost everything is XP compatible – I know of no particular problems reported with any scanner.
I, personally, would avoid Microtek. My wife’s Microtek scanner has been nothing but trouble, and Consumer Reports rated one of their scanners lowest because of its “speed.”
Here’s a link to a good comprehensive overview of buying a scanner:
http://www.consumersearch.com/www/computers/scanners/index.html
Holy piles of questions.
Who’s going to be operating it? How computer-savvy are they? How often will it be used?
What will it be used to scan? Photos? Slides? Oversized legal documents or newspaper pages? How many items in a session? Could you use a document feeder (like on a copier, for copying a stack of 8.5 x 11 pages)?
How fast does it need to be?
What’s the final output going to be? Web? Print? High-end offset printing?
How much money do you have to spend?
HP has some sound technology in this area and good, no-nonsense drivers - I’ve been really pleased with the scanner in my HP all-in-one device.
I bought a Mustek scanner for work not long ago and the colour reproduction was rather poor, and the driver pops up a big dialog box in the middle of your screen that remains on top of all the other windows for the duration of the scan and cannot be moved - I was trying to do a large batch of high-res scans, while doing another job at the same time and this was hugely inconvenient.
Ignore fancy claims about interpolated resolution - optical resolution is the only statistic that really matters - you can do interpolation yourself in Photoshop.
There are basically two types of scanner:
-Those that illuminate the subject with a white cold cathode light and scan it with a ccd in colour, like a digital camera does, only with mirrors and stuff instead of lenses - these are generally fast, but the lamp sometimes needs to warm up in order to get good colour representation.
-Those that illuminate the subject with a row of LEDs that cycles red-green-blue really rapidly, and the image is captured as a strip of intensities of light of each composite colour, then recostructed as a colour image by the driver (the process is transparent to the user) - these consume little power (some of them are driven entirely by the USB bus) and have no warmup time, but because the scanning head is in motion as the colours are cycling, the three composite strips of image are captured from slightly different positions and when they are put back together, they don’t always look very good; these scanners are generally slower to operate, and generally suffer from worse problems with ‘screening’* than cold-cathode models. I bought one of this type, made by Canon and it is a piece of utter shite (in fact I bought two of them and someone wandered into my office after hours and stole one - I asked the guy who saw him run off if he got the thief’s name so I could send him the other one)
*‘screening’ is a phenomenon that occurs when you try to scan a printed picture, such as one in a magazine, which is made up from halftone dots - because the capture resolution is unlikely to be exactly the same as the halftone dot pitch, an interference pattern is generated, making your scanned image look a bit like a tartan rug. Most modern scanner drivers have built-in correction for this, but you can also correct it in photo manipulation packages such as photoshop.
My advice to you is to definitely avoid the RGB LED illuminated and USB-bus-powered models.
Oh, and get a scanner that supports USB 2.0 - even if the machine you intend to run it on only currently suppoprts USB 1.1 - upgrading a PC to USB 2.0 is really cheap and easy.
I agree with Mangetout, toadspittle, and Nametag. I’ve bought 4 scanners which I used for occasional OCR, faxing, photocopying, and scanning photos: (1) A Visioneer for about USD 150 in about 1998. It worked great but the bulb burnt out because of a design fault. They fixed it for free. (2) I bought a similar Visioneer in about 2000 or about US 50. It still works great. (3) A film scanner for too much money in about 1999 that never worked. (4) A relatively high-end Epson flatbed film and document scanner for about USD300 a couple of years ago. I’ve been please with all of them except the film scanner. If you are just going to scan the occasional photo or document, I think you can get a perfectly acceptable scanner for USD 100.
I do have one word of advise: Pay attention to the software package that comes with the scanner. One reason I liked the first Visioneer I bought so much was that the software included a reasonable OCR package, a document editor that let me scan forms then enter data in them, a fax package, and, IIRC, a photo editing package.
No advice on the hardware, but if you’ll be using the scanner more than just occasionally, I’d recommend picking up a copy of VueScan, which in my experience is far better software than the kind of crap that usually comes with scanners. You’ll get better control of your scans, and an interface that doesn’t look like a defective toy.
[sub]Disclaimer: I do not work for Hamrick Software, or know anyone who does![/sub]
We have a huge positive cash flow, so money will not likely be a problem.
Having been thru this several times, either for work or myself…
If possible, ask around friends, family and people who work for other companies to find someone who has similar scanning needs to you and seems to have a satisfactory solution. Take down the specs of what they use and copy them. This is the safest way to deal with most purchase tasks in the computer world. It’s called ‘not re-inventing the wheel’.
Be boring. Stick to the most well-known and popular brands that lots of offices use. There’s a reason why these companies get to be successful and popular. Also, sticking to popular brands is safe, in that their hardware, software and drivers will probably be recognised and supported by third parties and you can get spare parts. I personally always look for a Hewlett-Packard solution first, because in my experience they make stuff that works. My current scanner was made by Agfa and it’s great (reliable, cheap) but they don’t make it any more!
As several respondents have mentioned, remember that the scanner is only as good as the software that comes with it. If possible, get to see a demo of the software and the scanner in action before you buy. Check with your boss what you’re goingto be using it for, and ask to see this task during the demo e.g. scanning a document so you can OCR it or scanning a big colour image so you can shove it in the company e-zine. A good sales rep for any of the majors or re-sellers will happily arrange this, and it’s a way to test how responsive a company really is.
Some ads for scanners present ritzy-dink fancy-ass claims. They might say they offer ‘near 3-D quality’ or their scanner can scan 3D objects or it offers a gazillion pixels resolution or it can scan the surface of Pluto etc. Totally ignore ALL of this garbage and avoid the brands that go in for this kind of hype. Just look for one that can do the simple, routine, day-to-day jobs you actually want, and without fuss.
Don’t buy an all-in-one multi-purpose thingy unless you actually need/want all the other bits. If you want something that just scans, don’t be talked into buying something that scans / faxes / walks the dog / recites popular monologues. The more multi-purpose a device is, the more ways it knows of going wrong at a crucial time.
Ordinarily I would subscribe to this view myself - don’t get a washer/dryer unless you want to be without both at some point - but in the case of scanners/printers, I caved under the pressure of limited desk space and bought an HP all-in-one (the lowest priced model in their range, I might add) - I am utterly converted, for the following reasons:
-It sets itself up - the printer prints a test sheet, then it asks you to put it on the scanner glass, it scans it and aligns the print heads automatically
-The scans are of high quality and are capture fast, even though it is only USB1.1*
-The printing is fast and of high quality*
-The printer and scanner drivers are reliable and no-nonsense.*
-On those odd occasions that you just want a quick copy of a bank statement or something, you can get a colour or monochrome copy in a few seconds without turning the PC on - the device handles it natively.
*(NB: these points would probably also be true of single-function devices from the same manufacturer - HP)
Oh, and it only occupies one USB port, but that’s a fairly trivial advantage.