Scanners

[jimbir]

I'm thinking of buying a quality flat bed scanner. Hoping to get by for $400 or less. Any suggestions / personal experience would be appreciated.

Jim B.

[trueblue]

I have a Canon flatbed scanner, CanoScan Lide 90. This is my second scanner - same one for about 15 years or more. Always found it reliable and simple to use. They're quite cheap to purchase too. You could go for an all-in-one, but I prefer the scanner separate to the printer. Google scanners and do a little research to find one that will suit your needs.

[df]

What do you plan on scanning? If it's just paper or reflective material you can get a relatively inexpensive scanner to do a fine job. If you're looking into scanning your father's slide collection on the other hand that starts getting expensive for the higher quality stuff.
Epson's scanners are highly regarded for flatbeds. From the examples I've seen of the Canons they aren't a bad choice either, some are even powered via the USB cable making them a great pairing for a laptop. I'll never own another HP scanner again, they're just not as good as my Epson.

[jimbir]

I scan a lot of articles from old books and magazines. PlusTek makes the optibook 3800 scanner for just this purpose. The specs are 1200 dpi, color 48 bit input - 24 bit output, greyscale, 16 bit input - 8 bit output. I don't understand the input - output part of their specification. Price wise, It's in the $250 range. The connection is USB 2.0. Is there anybody from Corel on this forum that would know if this scanner is supported by PSP X5?

One other question. I see lots of scanners ranging between 1200 and 9600 optical DPI resolution. My present scanner is rated at 1200 and seems to do what I want. Is there any reason to look for higher resolutions? I know, if I scan a page at 600 DPI, I get a monster file. I imagine something scanned at 9600 would be astronomical.

Jim

[df]

I scan a lot of articles from old books and magazines. PlusTek makes the optibook 3800 scanner for just this purpose. The specs are 1200 dpi, color 48 bit input - 24 bit output, greyscale, 16 bit input - 8 bit output. I don't understand the input - output part of their specification.

Input vs Output means that internally it's scanning at one range then compresses the file to send to your computer

Price wise, It's in the $250 range. The connection is USB 2.0.

While I have nothing against Plustek scanners, you can find less expensive scanners from Epson and Canon that would likely do just as fine of a job for articles.

Is there anybody from Corel on this forum that would know if this scanner is supported by PSP X5

Corel doesn't staff the User to User Forum. There are occasionally an employee or two that frequent here, but in an unofficial capacity. If the software that comes with the scanner includes a Twain driver then PSP or any other Twain compatible software can interface with it. I believe that Plustek scanners do come with Twain drivers, they are not bad scanners at all. Otherwise if it doesn't come with a Twain driver you'd simply use the supplied software to create a jpeg or pdf and use that in PSP. Keep in mind that the Twain driver is just an interface with the software, scanner, and PSP. You'd still have to learn the Plustek software to use the scanner.

One other question. I see lots of scanners ranging between 1200 and 9600 optical DPI resolution. My present scanner is rated at 1200 and seems to do what I want. Is there any reason to look for higher resolutions? I know, if I scan a page at 600 DPI, I get a monster file. I imagine something scanned at 9600 would be astronomical.

Jim

A general rule of thumb for printing is to print at 300 dpi. So if you scan at 600 dpi you should be getting plenty of information to work with. 9600 dpi is ridiculous since there's no lens in any scanner that can possibly make use of it. Also more often than not 9600 dpi is in reality 4800x9600 dpi, or in other words the scan head only moves a half pixel at a time thereby doubling the number of pixels the scan head reads but only in the direction of travel that the scan head goes.

Simply put, 1200 dpi should be able to give you a 4x enlargement. 2400 should give you 8x. etc.... If you never plan to enlarge that much you won't see much difference other than file size. There is a quality loss whenever scanning, and many advise doubling what the output is needed. So if you want to get a 1:1 printed at 300 dpi then scanning at 600d dpi gives you very close to the same quality.

[jimbir]

Thanks for all the information. I think I've settled on the Epson perfection V550 scanner. Anyone have experience with one of these?
Jim