Advice for Beginner

[jimbo]

I hope this is the right news group for a beginner's question.

I am shopping for a flatbed scanner for casual home use. PC World shows
the top five scanners for November 2005 as Epson 4490, Epson 3490,
Microtek S400, HP 4890 and a very low end Canon.

I would appreciate any advice.

Thanks, jimbo

 

[Dances With Crows]

I am shopping for a flatbed scanner for casual home use. PC World
shows the top five scanners for November 2005 as Epson 4490, Epson
3490, Microtek S400, HP 4890 and a very low end Canon. I would
appreciate any advice.

You need to be more specific about what it is that you want to do for
anyone to give you good advice. What are you scanning? Paper?
Negatives? What are you going to do with the images once you've got
them?

I have an Epson 3490, and it works just fine for my needs (paper, 300 or
600 DPI, grayscale or 8-bit color.) I haven't tried its negative
adapter because I have no negatives to try it with. It was $105 at
Worst Buy, which is pretty dang cheap. The 3490 is also supported under
Linux ( http://www.avasys.jp/english/linux_e/ ) and OS X, so it'll work
when you decide you want a Real OS.

Unlike the Canon LiDE series, it's powered via an AC adapter, and it's
fairly thick. If you want something very thin and/or powered via the
USB2 port, you won't like the 3490. HTH,

 

[jimbo]

You need to be more specific about what it is that you want to do for
anyone to give you good advice. What are you scanning? Paper?
Negatives? What are you going to do with the images once you've got
them?

I have an Epson 3490, and it works just fine for my needs (paper, 300 or
600 DPI, grayscale or 8-bit color.) I haven't tried its negative
adapter because I have no negatives to try it with. It was $105 at
Worst Buy, which is pretty dang cheap. The 3490 is also supported under
Linux ( http://www.avasys.jp/english/linux_e/ ) and OS X, so it'll work
when you decide you want a Real OS.

Unlike the Canon LiDE series, it's powered via an AC adapter, and it's
fairly thick. If you want something very thin and/or powered via the
USB2 port, you won't like the 3490. HTH,

Thanks for your reply. I will be scanning paper documents, magazine
pages, some photos but no 35mm slides or film. The 3490 looks too good
to be true. Such a low price for what appears to be a fairly full
featured scanner. And the added plus of Linux support since I dual boot
Linux and WinXP.

I will most likely scan to a file that can be E-mailed and/or edited and
printed.

jimbo

 

[Dances With Crows]

I will be scanning paper documents, magazine pages, some photos but no
35mm slides or film.

So, stuff on paper. This should work just fine.

The 3490 looks too good to be true. Such a low price for what appears
to be a fairly full featured scanner. And the added plus of Linux
support since I dual boot Linux and WinXP.

Technology just keeps getting cheaper all the time. (Well, except for
SCSI peripherals, but that's another story.) Heck, in 1984, a 128K
Apple //c, a 9" monochrome monitor, and a lousy printer cost $1500. The
same money today would buy you a *much* more powerful and useful
machine.

Epson is much more friendly to Linux than most other scanner companies.
That's one big reason why I bought an Epson scanner.

I will most likely scan to a file that can be E-mailed and/or edited
and printed.

Huh? *Any* file format can be e-mailed to somebody. Of common file
formats, the only one that's really uneditable is PDF. What did you
mean? Of all image formats, the one that's the most future-proof is
probably TIFF. Archive your images in TIFF. If you have to send images
to users who aren't very smart, convert those images into JPEG or PNG,
so the users won't be confused by images that web browsers won't
display.

 

[jimbo]

So, stuff on paper. This should work just fine.




Technology just keeps getting cheaper all the time. (Well, except for
SCSI peripherals, but that's another story.) Heck, in 1984, a 128K
Apple //c, a 9" monochrome monitor, and a lousy printer cost $1500. The
same money today would buy you a *much* more powerful and useful
machine.

Epson is much more friendly to Linux than most other scanner companies.
That's one big reason why I bought an Epson scanner.




Huh? *Any* file format can be e-mailed to somebody. Of common file
formats, the only one that's really uneditable is PDF. What did you
mean? Of all image formats, the one that's the most future-proof is
probably TIFF. Archive your images in TIFF. If you have to send images
to users who aren't very smart, convert those images into JPEG or PNG,
so the users won't be confused by images that web browsers won't
display.

Thanks again for your reply. I didn't know what file formats scanners
created. I probably want jpeg for most of my friends. Sounds like a
scanner has me covered with several different formats.

I think I will go with the Epson 3490. If I really get into something, I
can upgrade later without losing a lot.

Thanks again, jimbo

 

[Surfer!]

In message

Huh? *Any* file format can be e-mailed to somebody. Of common file
formats, the only one that's really uneditable is PDF. What did you
mean? Of all image formats, the one that's the most future-proof is
probably TIFF. Archive your images in TIFF. If you have to send images
to users who aren't very smart, convert those images into JPEG or PNG,
so the users won't be confused by images that web browsers won't
display.

Personally I would save the scan as a .TIFF, and convert to .JPG and
possibly resize to email. If you don't have any software that will do
this, Irfanview is free.

I do this because .JPG is a 'losy' format - to produce the file
compression which cannot be undone takes place. If I want a JPG for
anything (web for example), converting a TIFF image to JPG happens right
at the end of the process of scanning, rotating, straightening,
cropping, fixing colour & contrast and fixing any blemishes. I also
start out with a 'save as' at least at the first stage, so I don't alter
the original scan. Not so important with scans I guess (I can always
scan again) but vital with a digital photo.

Of course, you might be wanting to convert a scan to actual text - to do
OCR. The UK Epson site trumpets it's abilities to deal with photos &
negatives, but it includes ABBYY OCR software (according to the Dabs
site) so you should be able to convert a printed document to text in a
Word document or whatever. AFAIK, ABBYY isn't the best OCR software in
the world but the scanner bundle is £70 ($100 I think) and in the UK you
will pay almost the same again for a different OCR package...