Epson, canon or HP for A4 flatebd scanner?

[Kyle]

Your recommendations for Epson, canon or HP for A4 flatbed scanner?. Its for the Art dept and i need to get three. Should i go for the higher resolution scanners for around £100 or just go for a lesser resolution model around £60?

 

[contink]

Your recommendations for Epson, canon or HP for A4 flatbed scanner?. Its for the Art dept and i need to get three. Should i go for the higher resolution scanners for around £100 or just go for a lesser resolution model around £60?

 

 

Depends what they want it for...

 

Are they looking to scan negatives or slides?

 

Also bear in mind what resolution and media sizes they are wanting to output to.

If it's A3 photo quality from a standard photo size source you're going to want some serious muscle.

 

Also, watch out for true resolution over interpolated (think that's the term) where the software guesses the dots in between.

[Joanne]

i get the £40 ones, canon I think they are (from RM). Seem to do the job for our Art department!

[dhicks]

Your recommendations for Epson, canon or HP for A4 flatbed scanner?

 

We have a Canon LiDE 25. USB powered, so no dangling cables all over the place, and one-touch scanning function buttons on the front of the device. I've got this set up in the ICT room plugged in to a dedicated Windows XP machine - any time a pupil wants to scan something they come along, place their work in the top, hit "scan", wait a minute, then the file is available for them on a network drive. Nothing else needed, the computer doesn't even need a screen as the included software can be set to pop up, scan an image and dump it in a file automatically. A bargain at £30.

 

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David Hicks

[Joanne]

those are the ones we have... yes they are good!

[contink]

We have a Canon LiDE 25. USB powered, so no dangling cables all over the place, and one-touch scanning function buttons on the front of the device. I've got this set up in the ICT room plugged in to a dedicated Windows XP machine - any time a pupil wants to scan something they come along, place their work in the top, hit "scan", wait a minute, then the file is available for them on a network drive. Nothing else needed, the computer doesn't even need a screen as the included software can be set to pop up, scan an image and dump it in a file automatically. A bargain at £30.

 

That sounds useful.. care to share how?

[dhicks]

That sounds useful.. care to share how?

 

The software that comes with the scanner (CanoScan Toolbox) is easy to set up - there's a row of software buttons that can be set to operate when one of the three buttons on the front of the scanner are pressed. It's just a simple case of clicking on a button in the software, saying what you want to happen (scan at so-and-so resolution, don't ask user for confirmation, write to a numbered file in network folder X) and that's about it. I should probably get around to having a cron job on our file server that clears out the scanned files every night, and the Samba write mask should probably be set so that files written instantly become read-only. You can set the other two buttons to scan at different resolutions if you like, or I've got one to send all scanned items to the printer sat next to the scanner, i.e. now we have a (for some reason really slow) photo copier!

 

If you planned this a bit you could probably get a decent flat, fanless PC case and stand the scanner on top of it, nice and neat and tidy

 

--

David Hicks

[contink]

Ah.. useful.

 

Now that you mention it though I've just remembered that the HP L7680 and L7780 both have "Direct Digital Filing Speed-dial" settings which allow you to scan to a network location.

 

You've just prodded my memory to check that one out some more actually

[Sylv3r]

Canon Lide 25 and 35's here.

 

Excellent scanner for around the £30 mark. They just seem to work!

[hotwired007]

If you planned this a bit you could probably get a decent flat, fanless PC case and stand the scanner on top of it, nice and neat and tidy

 

i'm going to be doing this with a couple of my old RM P3 600 PC's... great way to re use some old desktop PC's...

[hotwired007]

HP have really gone down in my estimation for scanners of late.

 

they've gone down for a few things recently scanners/printers - they're just concentrating on pcs/servers/networking....