Hello again,
Let us know some more of your requirements, such as use case, budget, etc,
and I'll try to offer some more anecdotes (if I have any).
I'm mostly interested in scanning photos, with a little bit of
document scanning. The price range that I'm looking at is
somewhat fluid. I don't purchase hardware very often, thus I
don't feel too bad if I exceed whatever budget I've made up.
I think the "standard" advice for prints is to get a flatbed with the
highest optical resolution you can afford and the fastest interface bus
(USB 3, etc).
You'll want to look at the scan times at the highest resolution, rather
than the fastest ones quoted or the ones at 300dpi which are mostly aimed
at document scanning.
This site: https://www.scantips.com/ (linked somewhere from the first set
of pages I mentioned in the previous email) has a good overlap between
scanning and photography. The examples tend to use Windows software, but
the principles are all the same.
I've got an absolutely ancient HP scanner (with USB and Fast SCSI
interfaces) that I picked up on eBay for £4.99 about 10 years ago (and it
was ancient then). It's really handy for detailed colour work and stuff
that doesn't fit in the iX500 document feeder.
...but it's *really* slow and that puts me off using it. I have a box on
top of it and when it' full, I scan everything in.
I use it over USB and it can't even do a full page at 300dpi without
filling its buffer and therefore having to pause, painfully reverse, and
then continue at least twice. Perhaps it'd be better if I used the SCSI
interface but I don't have the correct cable at the moment.
All that to say: speed is really important. The scans are great, and need a
lot less tweaking than the SnapScan but it's just not as convenient to use.
...and therefore it gets used a lot less.
For negatives you can get dedicated negative scanners and negative holders
for flatbed units. Let me know if you find a good one that's fast. When I
last played with them (admittedly nearly 20 years ago) they were painfully
slow, even with a good (for the time) SCSI interface. Scanning a whole roll
of film (36 frames) would take over half an hour.
Thanks again for sharing your scanning story with me.
:-)
Best wishes,
@ndy
--
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http://www.ashurst.eu.org/
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