Can someone recommend a good scanner that is FAST? This HP scanned pathetically slow...and then it had to transmit it through the printer port. I am looking for a USB scanner that can scan a page in under 5 seconds at high resolution. Does this exist?

Another requirement is that the scanner needs to be able to scan color and black and white. Scanning manuals in color bloats the pdf file sizes, so that is not an option for simple text scans.

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Steve

I would bet that a good FW scanner could download a 8X10 color photo in around 30 seconds... maybe less.

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Can someone recommend a good scanner that is FAST? This HP scanned pathetically slow...and then it had to transmit it through the printer port. I am looking for a USB scanner that can scan a page in under 5 seconds at high resolution. Does this exist?

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Brad, what type of material are you scanning, text, line drawings, photos? What resolution do you need? What page sise? Where are the scans going, web page, ink jet printer, laser printer, photo setter? Do you need to scan film, or just paper? How much do you want to spend? Will you be doing enough to need a document feeder?

Unless you want to spend a lot, the HP or Epson models are probably about the best. I would say the HP ones are slightly more robust, but the Epson ones make a slightly better job of photos; it's the same with their printers.

We have a large number of HPs of various models at work, and I have an Epson 1640SU, now replaced by an updated model, at home. Both work well.

If you are scanning paper, you probably do not need more than 600 dpi, unless you are scanning something very small, of very high quility, and are enlarging it a lot. For scanning film you need more, my Epson does 1600 dpi, proper resolution, not interpolated, which is fine for 5x4 and medium format film, but a bit low for 35mm, I have a film scanner for that. Take a look at www.britishtransportfilms.co.uk go to the 'filmstrips' section, scroll down to the 'B' titles, and you will find that one has a link on it. Almost all of the frames on this strip were scanned on my Epson at 1600 dpi. because I did not want to cut the original strip to get it into the film scanner. A few problem frames were optically copied onto a dup neg, and then done on the film scanner. These were 18x24 frames, but with a wide black border, the actual pictures were only about 20mm wide, flatbed scanners are not ideal for this type of work, but they can do it. 5x4 scans are very good, I would send you one, but they are close to 150 MB. The text of the lecturer's notes which accompany the film strip was scanned on the same machine, and OCRd. There were only about two errors in the whole thing.

My scanner will do an A4 page at 300 dpi in about five seconds, but higher resolutions take longer.

Just about all desktop scanners now have USB, the HP ones tend to have parallel as well, Epsons tend to be USB only, some of the previous modles like mine had SCSI as well, but they seem to have dropped this on the latest ones. USB will be fine, unless you are doing a lot of very large scans, when SCSI or Firewire would be better. What operating system are you running? Windows NT4 does not support USB, 2000 and XP are not very happy with parallel, I would avoid parallel anyway, Macintosh has supported USB since system 8.something.

Scanners tend to be replaced by new models quite frequently, but the latest models now are not much different to the previous ones, a couple of years ago progress was more rapid.

Sone scanners are very thin, only about 25mm thick, these use a somewhat different technology, and I don't find them as good. I would avoid them unless you have a desparate need to carry one around in a briefcase.

Hope this helps, it's difficult to recommend a particular model without knowing more about what you want to use it for.

For scanning reflective material, this scanner is really fast. It rockets through prescans faster than any flatbed I've seen. And it captures the higher res scans really fast as well. I don't know about 5 seconds since I've never timed it. But something like the page out of a manual captured at 300dpi or less won't take long at all.

Scanning negatives and slides is a bit on the slow side (if you scan at 2400, 3200 or 4800 res), and you'll have to fart around with color adjustments some. But it still works pretty well, noticeably better than my retired $1,300 Linotype-Hell Saphir SCSI scanner.

Overall, a very good value for a scanner in the $300-$400 price range.

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I do not know of any film scanner as such, but my Epson flatbed with the film attachment will do it. You do not need to thread the end of film through it, you just drape the film over the scanner glass. You would not be able to use the film holders which come with the scanner, they are not very good anyway, but you can fix the edges of the film to the glass with small pieces of splicing tape.

The filmstrip scan that I put the link to in my previous post was done this way.

I will try to get inserted below a scan from a film which, while much older, 1938 v 1951, is of better qualitiy. This is a reduced resolution jpeg, good enough for on-screen use, but not for printing.

If you are interested, let me know, and I will e-mail you a copy of the original full resolution (1600 dpi) tiff file. It is 1.63 MB.

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Please insert Title frame.jpg here.

However, I am now using Windows 2000 Professional and when I tried to load the drivers for the scanner, Windows 2000 flashed a message that basically said, "Get a life, dude."

I looked on Visioneer's website. No drivers are available for my specific model to make it run under Windows 2000.

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