[sane-devel] newbie

[Andy Bennett]

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

-- 
andyjpb at ashurst.eu.org
http://www.ashurst.eu.org/
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