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Scanners, please tell us about your scanner

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Ami_GFX:
A bit of an update.

After reading this thread, I checked ebay to see what replacing my scanner would cost if it failed and it was quite a bit more than the yard sale price I got it for. Then I took a look at the manual which covers 4 related HP scanners as I was scanning a comic yesterday and found mine had a USB 1 connection and not a USB 2 as I had assumed. The higher end 3970 model did have USB 2 as well as 2400dpi resolution and I did an ebay search for it and one popped up right away for $15 buy it now and I bought it on impulse and paid more for the shipping than the scanner. It takes me about an hour to scan a 36 page comic at 200 dpi with my current scanner and I'm not losing too much time due to the slower USB speed which takes about 10 seconds to transfer the image to my laptop after the scan is finished. This should happen almost instaneously with my new scanner. If the mechanical part of the scan isn't any faster it won't make that much difference. It might be. My experience with HP printers is that the more you pay for the printer, the faster they print and it might be the same for their scanners. In any case, I seem to be spending more time straigtening the comic book in the scanner bed than anything else. There is an auto alignment option in the scanner software but it doesn't seem to work too well.

Yoc:
Good luck with the HP AG.
I have to say I'm far from impressed with the HP Scanjet 4370 that I have.
'If it was any slower it would go in reverse'  ;)

narfstar:
Ami straightening has always been the thorn in my scanning side.

Snard:

--- Quote from: narfstar on February 17, 2011, 02:25:57 PM ---Ami straightening has always been the thorn in my scanning side.

--- End quote ---
Just tossing my 2 cents in here, regarding straightening.

I've had the best luck doing straightening in my editing software. I generally straighten based on the printed material on the page, not the paper or spine edge. I use Paintshop Pro, which has a Straighten function in which you position a "rubber band" line along a horizontal or vertical feature on the page. Then you click the "Apply" button and it rotates the page fractionally so that the line you positioned is now vertical or horizontal (whichever is closer). It works pretty well. I'm told that Photoshop has a similar tool, but I don't use that software so I can't tell you how it works.

Ami_GFX:
I'm using an old version of Image Ready to do image size reduction. I'll check and see if there's an image alignment function. I was looking at my Blue Beetle 5 last night and--good old Charlton print quality--the pages aren't straight in the book and it will scan skewed even if the pages are straight in the scanner.

The seller just sent me friendly message and said the scanner has very little use. I'm hoping this parallels an experience I've had with HP printers. I had a Deskjet 722c and it was good quality for the price and the ink cartriges were huge and it was fairly inexpensive in per page costs but it was slow as mud. It gave up the ghost and I'd just bought cartridges so I got a more expensive 882c which on the outside and inside hardware was absolutely identical and used the same cartridges and this printer just churned out pages. The difference in the 2 printers was mostly firmware and it looked like a marketing trick to me--if a salesman let a prospective customer try both, they would more than likely pop a few more dollars for the fast printer. These days I use an Officejet business printer which is huge and has separete ink cartriges and printheads and can print up to small poster size and it just rocks in the speed department.

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