I was thinking of posting a note about a NEW FIND in scanners, and this really really old thread is about the only one that came up when I searched mudcat. I'm sure there are lots of other better ones, but I found this one interesting because of the changes in equipment available now, which border on what we'd have thought fantastic when the thread was new.

I've been running close to 1,000 pages per day through my newest scanner (less than 6 months old), bought specifically so that I could "digitally archive" bunches of old books that I occasionally use for reference, but that take up more shelf space than we've got. It's a "business class" scanner and doesn't do a particularly great job on pictures. Color is fair but gray-scale stuff often "solarizes." It only runs up to 8.5" wide, but I can flop 50 sheets on it, and it feeds and scans both sides in a single pass, without even needing to turn the sheet over. It can save an individual .jpg of each page or a .pdf of the whole bunch. And it came with a pdf maker program (that I upgraded to a little more complete one) that automatically does the OCR to make editable text when you save as pdf. The scanner can save directly as .jpg, .pdf, .tif, multi-tif, or .bmp. The (upgraded) pdf program lets me merge mixed bunches of any of those into a single .pdf, and once a "document" is created as a .pdf the program can save-as any of 17 different fomats. On reasonably "clean text" the whole setup makes very few OCR errors - compared to what was available not very long ago.

For the pages I want better pictures on, I've been using a 12(?) year old flatbed scanner/printer that's about to blow it's lamp, so I've been looking around for a replacement. I thought I found a good one, but "she" absconded with it; and we've found some unpleasantness with scanning using the "built-in" WIA interface. I think I can rig it for TWAIN, which would solve the little problems, but that's still "on the menu for later."

The other need for a flat bed is for the stuff that's too wide to go through the document feed, and I'd almost given up on finding any scanner that will scan more than 8.5" wide, for less than about $3,000 (US). It takes lots of scans to capture the whole of something that's 10 x 12 or so from an 8.5 x 11 bed, and good as it is, photomerge to put a "big picture" back together isn't always perfect, so the more pieces you have to stitch together the scabbier it gets.

The news I originally thought I wanted to post is that when I went back to check specs on a scanner I thought might be good enough, I found that Epson now has a couple of "wide format" machines in their lineup, that while not "cheap" are not unreasonable for what they claim to do. The one I ordered has a flatbed that can scan 11 x 17 (US B size), and it can print 13 x 19 (called Super B by some here) - A4 to A6 for the Euro folk. Somewhere in the notes it said it can print 13" x 40" but they didn't say how the $#@% you feed the paper in it to do that. Since I was pondering $200 for a scanner and another $150 for a decent printer, I figure the $299.99 for this beast isn't too bad a hit.

Since it's a "business class" machine, I'm not expecting the prints to be "photo quality" but samples they showed are definitely "magazine quality." The scan specs are good enough that scans may print photo grade on "her" (sniff) photo printer.

And they claim it does hold 500 sheets of letter size in the magazine, and it has a 30+ sheet(?) automatic document feed (ADF) for the scanner if you don't want to use it as a flat-bed.

I won't get the thing for about a week, so I can't actually recommend it until I get some trial runs, but anyone interested will have some idea where to look.

Almost any scanner or multi-purpose machine you can buy now does come with "scan to pdf" and OCR software, and they (mostly) do a pretty good job of both. It's the other "details" that you have to watch.

So if we ignore what Microsoft has been doing to us recently, the world is getting a little better.

John