Need Advice on Optical Scanners

Mick Rice

Howdy,
I'm looking for some direction about the purchase of a digital/optical scanner. I know almost nothing about photography and only a little about computing. I write articles for the web and print about the history of athletics and the people I talk with often loan me old printed photographs that I need to capture for an editor to select from for print and sometimes for use on the web. At the moment I have access to a fairly new combined office photocopier/printer/scanner that has served well enough so far but has occasionally failed to capture photographs well. I think the highest setting on this machine is 600x600 dpi. In fairness I think it's not designed for working with very fine images. Some of the picutres I get access to are quite rare and I want to be able to capture them in as fine a detail as possible and so I think I need to buy a scanner of my own to do this stuff from home rather than at the office.

Can anyone advise on a model of scanner or a resolution that I should be looking for or could buy.

Any advice appreciated,

Thanks,

Mick.

stcstc

have a look at something like the epson V500 scanner

its an above average flatbed, and as long as your scaning prints this will do very well

Mick Rice

Stcstc - Thanks for that. I realise now that I should have said I'm on a fairly tight budget. What are the benefits of the Epson at 265 on Komplet agains something like this Cannon from the same supplier http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=397060 ?

stcstc

mick


the v500 would be one of the better end of the range for flatbed stuff

i havent used the other one, but i would say, you pays for what you get

the other thing might be to get the canon and then for anything very important get someone with a better scan to do the scans for you

cnocbui

Mick Rice wrote: »

. At the moment I have access to a fairly new combined office photocopier/printer/scanner that has served well enough so far but has occasionally failed to capture photographs well. I think the highest setting on this machine is 600x600 dpi.

When printing a photo, 300dpi is usually considered enough for a high quality result. 600 dpi should be plenty adequate to capture fine detail in a photo.

Are you sure you are even getting 600dpi when you use the scanner? You might find the scanning software is defaulting to a lower resolution like 150dpi. To get 600 dpi you might need to use a custom or manual setting.

Since the machine you have is fairly new, I suspect the resolution could even be more than 600 dpi. I have 3 year old Canon all in one and it's scanning resolution is 2400 x 4800 dpi. If you use the scanning software that comes with the scanner, the maximum resolution you can scan at is limited to 600 dpi. But if you use Photoshop to access and drive the scanner, you can get 1200 dpi. Here is a 1200 dpi portion of an OS map. I think it illustrates why 600 dpi is considered 'enough' for most cases.






If I use Image Capture on my Mac, I can scan at the full resolution the scanner is capable of.

I strongly suspect the scanner you have is probably adequate and that purchasing another device is probably not necessary. The trick is finding out how to get the most out of it.

What is the make and model of the device you are using?

pjproby

out of curiosity-is there any advantage in simply taking a photograph of the photograph rather than scanning it?

cnocbui

pjproby wrote: »

out of curiosity-is there any advantage in simply taking a photograph of the photograph rather than scanning it?

No.

Mick Rice

The machine I have access to is the Develop ineo +550 (specs: http://austasia.net/Develop/Develop_INEO_+550_specs.pdf). When I'm trying to scan old photos I use the manual settings to select the highest possible resolution but seem to end up with ever so slightly less sharp images than what I started with. I've tried to attach an example but had to resize it down to attach and so am not sure if that defeats the purpose. The originally scanned image was over 2mb.

cnocbui

It seems to me the levels are off a bit in that scan, resulting in a lack of contrast. Perhaps this might be the problem as contrast has a strong influence on perceived sharpness.

I adjusted the levels in photoshop, does this look any better?



2mb is not very large for an original scan.

Mick Rice

I can see some difference alright. My original worries were more based on the perceived difference between thge quality/sharpness visible on the print and that captured by the scan, but I'll be the first to admit that I don't have a good eye for judging such distinctions. I started to be more concerns when my editor commented negatively on the quality of the scanned image for publication and I stated to compare back to my source print. Perhaps this machine is capturing enough detail but I need to learn how to manipulate the resultant scan with more skill.