Which of these cheap scanners is the fastest one scanning A4 documents?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Edulvigio
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Edulvigio

I'm planning to buy a low cost scanner. I won't be using it for
photographs, slides or anything like that, only interested in scanning
A4 sized documents. I'm not interested on 100% faithful colors or 2400
dpi optical resolutions, my main concern is scanning speed.

I'm thinking of these flatbed scanners:

-Canon Lide 35
-Epson Perfection 1670
-Epson Perfection 1260
-Epson Perfection 2480
-HP Scanjet 3770
-HP Scanjet 2400

So, which one is faster for scanning documents at 300/600 dpi?
Checking the specs won't give me a clear and real answer. If someone
uses one of those scanners above, how fast can you scan a document
page with your scanner? Let's compare and see who has the faster
low-end scanner -for documents, at least.

(It's like going back to those kindergarten days and argue about
whose's dad/mom had the best car, only with real figures this time, I
hope! ;-)

Thanks.
 
Edulvigio said:
I'm planning to buy a low cost scanner. I won't be using it for
photographs, slides or anything like that, only interested in scanning
A4 sized documents. I'm not interested on 100% faithful colors or 2400
dpi optical resolutions, my main concern is scanning speed. [snip list]
So, which one is faster for scanning documents at 300/600 dpi?
Checking the specs won't give me a clear and real answer. If someone
uses one of those scanners above, how fast can you scan a document
page with your scanner? Let's compare and see who has the faster
low-end scanner -for documents, at least.
Click to expand...

For comparison, I do a fair bit of document scanning on a Canon
all-in-one scanner/copier/printer (I don't remember the model number,
but it's the size of a standard office copier, and about a year old) in
the office at work. It seems to run about 8-10 pages per minute at
600dpi black/white, and I think that's largely limited by the network
speed on transferring the data (over ethernet) to my computer.

On the HP Scanjet flatbed that I've used for occasional scanning of
multipage documents, I found that about half my time was spent
positioning paper and saving the files -- maybe 20 seconds per page, if
I had a good rhythm going. So I strongly suspect the data you get will
be as much an indicator of which _person_ is faster as it is of the
speed of the scanners.

- Brooks
 
Epson 2480 on a 2400 Athlon SIS746FX 768Mb USB2.0.

300dpi.............8 sec preview, 17 sec A4 full scan.

600dpi.............8 sec preview, 34 sec A4 full scan.

That's from pressing OK to seeing the preview, or OK to seeing the filename
appearing in an Explorer window, saved.
 
Brooks Moses wrote:

On the HP Scanjet flatbed that I've used for occasional scanning of
multipage documents, I found that about half my time was spent
positioning paper and saving the files -- maybe 20 seconds per page, if
I had a good rhythm going. So I strongly suspect the data you get will
be as much an indicator of which _person_ is faster as it is of the
speed of the scanners.
Click to expand...

Then, to make myself clearer: I'd like to know the time passed AFTER
positioning the paper. About file saving, I guess the time needed for
the system to receive the data depends on whether the scanner-computer
interface is SCSI, parallel, USB or USB Hi Speed. I think all the
scanners I mentioned before are USB or USB HI Speed. Not sure which one
in some of them. So, the time to transmit data to system is to be
accounted in the comparison too.
 
Brooks Moses wrote:



Then, to make myself clearer: I'd like to know the time passed AFTER
positioning the paper. About file saving, I guess the time needed for
the system to receive the data depends on whether the scanner-computer
interface is SCSI, parallel, USB or USB Hi Speed. I think all the
scanners I mentioned before are USB or USB HI Speed. Not sure which one
in some of them. So, the time to transmit data to system is to be
accounted in the comparison too.
Click to expand...
Get out your calculator.

The transfer speed is a constant of the interface speed. Each interface has
known data transfer rates, which you can find for each type of interface.

Some common rates:
1 byte = 8 bits
USB 1.1 = 12 Megabits per second.
USB 2.0 = up to 480 Megabits per second.
FireWire (IEEE 1394) = about 400 Megabits per second
SCSI is all over the place, You have to know the one you are using.
Most SCSI is slower than the newer USB 2.0.
The SCSI II is 8 bits wide and many scanners are SCSI II, speed is about 33
Megabytes per second.

The length of time it takes to transfer X amount of data is speed of
transfer X amount of data in bytes.

Example using SCSI at 33 MB per second.
For a 25 MB scan (color 8.5 x 11 at 300 dpi).
33 MB per sec = 1/ 33,000,000=3.03030303030303030303030303030303e-8 seconds
per byte.
The above number X 25,000,0000=0.757575757575757575757575757575758 seconds.
Or about 3/4 of a second for 25 MB.

The interface is usually not the bottle neck in scanning. Except for USB 1.1
or even the original Serial Com Port.

A chart for interface speeds.
http://www.macspeedzone.com/archive/5.0/de/gifs/firewirevsscsi.gif
 
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