[geeks] Scanner recommendations?

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Feb 28, 2008, at 06:42 , Michael-John Turner wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm looking at clearing all the paper clutter out of my house as  
> well as
> archiving family photos, so am in the need of a decent scanner.
>
> My requirements:
> - Good quality scanning of documents and photos
> - Supported by OS X (Linux support a bonus)
> - Reasonable scanning speed (whatever that may mean!)
> - Reasonable price (say in the region of GBP 100/$200 at most)

It will be hard to find a scanner worth having for that much money.

I wanted to do the same thing this past fall, and I ended up getting a  
Fujitsu SnapScan S500M for a bit over $400 US.

It is excellent.  Fast, accurate, handles fairly bad paper in all  
sizes, and is still quite small for a sheet fed scanner.

I don't know if it works under Linux or not.

There is a "Windows" version of the scanner.

I don't know if there are any real hardware differences between the  
Mac and Windows versions or not.  I suspect it is just the software  
bundle.

> Anyone got any recommendations? Those of you who've scanned, eg, old  
> Byte
> and Popular Mechanics articles, what software and hardare did you use?

I scanned a lot of magazine articles without too much problem.

Magazines are difficult because the paper is really low quality and  
quite fragile.

Also, you need to cut out the articles and leave no jagged edges or  
holes which might snag other pages during feeding because the paper is  
so weak it can misfeed.

As long as you are careful it should go well.

I really like having the articles scanned, because I could never index  
the printed stuff well enough to reference frequently, and now it's  
just a Spotlight search away.

> How good is OCR these days? Would love to be able to scan in an old  
> magaine
> article and have a combined text and image PDF created rather than  
> purely
> an image PDF.

The Fuji comes with Abby FineReader which works pretty good, except  
for a few issues:

- the scanner software does not queue files to run through FR, instead  
it returns
   an error if FR is not yet finished with the last document
- Abby has not updated FineReader for MacOS in years, so you get an  
older version
   from Fujitsu, and so far I've not had good luck getting support, or  
the latest
   version 5 from them (for Mac, Windows is at version 10 or something).
- FineReader must be started by the scanner software.  It's probably a  
stupid license
   enforcement issue becauase it also refuses to scan anything not  
originally scanned
   by the Fujitsu.

On the other hand, the Fujitsu came with a full copy of Acrobat  
Professional 8, which has good OCR built it.  More cumbersome to use,  
but it does a good job.

It does, of course, have the usual Adobe annoyances, one of which is  
to reset the application for each PDF file so it opens with Acrobat  
instead of the program you
want.  That's one MacOS "feature" I really hate.


-- 
"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."