How good of a scanner is this [Epson 3590?]
How good of a truck is a Ford F-150?
It'd help if you said exactly what you were going to be scanning, what
you need as far as resolution, and whether you had any odd requirements
wrt color fidelity. I haven't seen any insanely negative reports about
that scanner on this newsfroup, and my Epson 3490 (the 3590's little
brother) works well for what I need (paper, 300 dpi, 8-bit color).
Getting the 3590 working in 'Doze98 (your OS, according to your headers)
may be annoying. 98 was EOLed before the 3590 hit store shelves, after
all. I don't know; I try to avoid all varieties of 'Doze as much as
possible. Almost all of Epson's scanners work fine in Real OSes, using
the epkowa backend for SANE or that program they put together for OS X.
Epson has this scanner for $79.00; it is a refurb one.
Factory-refurbished equipment means you get more for your $, so this is
good. HTH,