OT: good scanners (was: Re: [sane-devel] Fujitsu Scan Partner 620c works)

[Brian K. White]

Garrick Sitongia wrote:
> I've read suggestions that although the Fujitsu Scan Partner 620c
> should work, it is untested. I took a chance and bought one on Ebay,
> and it works great under SANE. I've been using Xsane to try it out
> and all the imaging features seem to work. Also the Automatic
> Document Feeder as well as Flatbed scanning works.
>
> The only complaint so far is that for a Color scan there is a the 15
> second lag before scanning begins, then scanning takes 15 seconds at
> 300dpi. Excellent work, thanks SANE.
>
> Garrick Sitongia
>
> FYI, the scanner was $130 on Ebay.

Holy cow.
That's the scanner we spec for all our customers if they get the scanning
add-on to our software. We pay over $1000 each!
Recently we got ourselves a 15c for in-house use and testing/development and
it seems to be just as good. and that is still over $500. It looks the same
and works the same. I can only assume that there are $500 worth of
inferiority in there _somewhere_.

Another good one is the canon DR3080c. One of our customers uses those and
it sure is a neat tidy little unit, fast, quiet, scans in duplex, little
desktop space.  _Better_ be good at $3000 each.
One thing to note however, to load the canon, you put a stack of papers in
the input tray and the scanner sort of grabs the whole stack. A that point
you can either let it finish the job, or abort the job, but what you cannot
do is add more sheets to the job while it is running. This would cause
problems where one "document" might be more sheets than the input hopper
holds and the application expects all sheets in a document to be part of one
twain session. The fujitsu and others like it allow this with no problem,
you can keep feeding the scanner continuously as long as you want. It's
because the canon draws papers from the top of the stack, requiring an
elevator mechanism to push the stack up against the feeder to scan and
release it allow loading. Whereas the fujitsu draws from the bottom and
there is just a simple rubber pad that holds back the rest of the stack
which is not perturbed by adding or removing papers to/from the top while
the feeder is taking from the bottom.
(since this is sane-devel, I guess I should at least mention that I have no
idea if this one is supported in sane)

Everyone always complains how big the fujitsu is but anyone who does is
overlooking one important feature.
The large ungainly size is mostly due to the fact that the paper feeder
ejects out the side, requiring even more desktop space than the base unit
itself. That is not by accident though. It's like that so that the paper
path is practically a straight line with only one roller and no turns and no
obstructions. Thus it's very difficult to jam this thing and it almost never
"eats" a document. even really thin flimsy and wrinkled carbonless sheets
and thigs go through because the paper is not required to have any stiffness
of it's own. In our (well, our customers') case this happens to be a big
deal because the documents being scanned have been in the tender care of
truck drivers for several days and often started out as flimsy sheets to
begin with.

Brian K. White  --  brian@aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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