Scanner recommendations

[StSangue]

Hi Gang.

I'm in the market for a new scanner and I want the most bang for my buck.

I want one that can do 35 mm slides and one that has a hopper for multiple photos and documents.

Does anything spring to mind that's given anyone good results that won't be an affront to decency in terms of cost?

[Capmaster]

I'm only familiar with two brands - Nikon and Hewlett Packard. The Nikon Coolscan is superb for negatives and slides, but costs a fortune. The HP is a great general purpose scanner, and is priced nicely, but doesn't excel at negatives.

I think this thread will do better in the Computer forum.

[rallynavvie]

I use Epson 1670s at work. There's a new version out though, I can't recall the number.

[thecoalman]

I have a HP 3970, happy with it. It works well enough for me, doesn't have the hopper or automatic feed. My only complaint is the 220 meg installation that is required, can you say the ultimate bloatware. I tried just the driver install but that won't work cause guess what, it needs all the other crap to communicate. Still trying to figure out what could possibly be contained in that 220 megs

[SaSi]

I had an HP with negative holder. It was a 2400dpi optical resolution scanner but scanning negatives in the max resolution gave awful results, much worse than the same negative scanned at 2000dpi with my Canon negative scanner.

I wouldn't count on using the flatbed scanner for negatives. Picture clarity is unbearable and scanning strips of 6 negatives is impossible - they don't fit. Furthermore, you must scan each negative separatelly as the s/w is not able to scan each negative to a different file. Scanning 5 negatives at 2400dpi (actually a very long stripe of scanning area) will give you a file worth a few hundreds of megabytes. Unless you have 1Gb or more RAM, you won't be able to do much with this.

Apart from negatives and slides, scanning photos, magazines and printed paper will never require more than 300dpi. Any descent scanner ($100 or more) will give you 2400dpi or more and if it is USB2 will give you speed.

Since you also mention a document feeder, this means that you need to go up-market pricewise. The HP Scanjet 5550c has a feeder that doesn't clogg so easily.

EPSON has a remarkable product for photos (Perfection 4870) but doesn't come with a sheet feeder. On the other hand, it offers 4800x9600dpi and a 3.8D picture density. Even if the 3.8 is optimistic, it is much better than the average 2.4~2.8 (out of 4) that a normal flatbed would give you - and the real reason why most flatbeds cannot scan negatives.
A good compromise could be the Perfection 1680/Pro. It claims a density of 3.6 and has an optional sheet feeder.

Fujitsu and Microtek have excellent scanners, but lack models that combine document feeding capabilities with photo scanning.

[rallynavvie]

Holy damn, what are you scanning at anything higher than 600dpi for?

[SaSi]

Holy damn, what are you scanning at anything higher than 600dpi for?

If you are refering to my reply, negatives require a very high scanning resolution. 1200dpi is marginally acceptable and cannot produce prints of more than 10x15cm with acceptable quality. I scan my negatives at 2000dpi and slides at 4000dpi on a film scanner.

On the other hand, photos are scanned at 360dpi and magazines at 180dpi.

[edsmith77]

For another data point.
There is a fairly decent scanner with a document feeder for 150 USD at Staples. Microtek 5950. Software interface could be better but it will suffice. Unfortunately it does not come with a slide film adapter.
It does 2400 x 4800 native optical scans. With software you can get much more.

Ed

[StSangue]

Thanks for all of the excellent input.

How well do the document feeders handle photos?

[SaSi]

Thanks for all of the excellent input.

How well do the document feeders handle photos?

Forget it.

Low cost models won't be able to handle 10x15cm photos or other material of that size.

Low cost models won't handle thick paper (like photos) well.

Glossy photos will be another issue in most scanners.

Also, avoid scanners with different values of resolutions along the two axis. E.g. 1200x600, 2400x4800 ,etc.

Material scanned on such a scanners typically exhibit linear artifacts, even when you scan at lower resolutions (e.g. scanning at 360x360 on a 2400x4800 scanner).

Also, don't be tempted by ultra-high resolution citations. Nobody want's to scan a photo at 1200x1200, unless you want to get the grain of the paper on file. Even if you want to create a huge blow-up of a photo, say 2meters by 3 meters (!!) scanning at 480dpi generates more problems.

Consider that a photo of 5" x 7" scanned at 1200dpi will produce a 150Mb image in 24-bit color space. If you want to scan at the advertised 48-bits, make that 300Mb. You would need about 1Gb of RAM to properly handle this photo (even it compressed in Jpeg would occupy only 15Mb).