LA2 wrote: I can report that the Canon ImageFormula DR-M160 is a good buy.
I am interested in this scanner. Could you elaborate a bit on the user-friendliness of the included divers/software? I have a Fujitsu fi-6130 and it's pure frustration. The TWAIN driver is an total mess, integration with Kofax VRS is completely inconsistent and the ISIS driver is not much better. You need VRS because the TWAIN driver does not support auto-cropping. The software of Fujitsu fi-6130 is far from intuitive and user-friendly (even Fujitsu support admits this). And Fujitsu's scan software ScandAll Pro is a scandal! You need to read hundreds of pages of user manuals to perhaps get proper quality scans. And even if you spend hours on doing this and testing scans and presets, you just get inferior results.
On the other hand, I am quite fine with the software/drivers of Canon flatbed scanners that I use(d). But these flatbeds are rather consumer level devices.
How are the software/drivers that are bundled with the Canon ImageFormula DR-M160? Would you say the use is intuitive and you get good scans with reasonable amount of time needed for fine-tuning driver settings and presets (scan profiles)? Or is it rather that kind of "professional" software where the manufacturer did not care to iron out numerous inconsistencies that drive even knowledgeable users mad.
Do you have any experience with Canon's flatbed units 101 (A4) and 201 (A3) that can be connected to the ImageFormula DR-M160?
I use scandallPro with an FI5750C, and whilst I will admit it isn't the best software I have used, it does the job, and I don't find it to be too much of a problem - stopping dust getting behind the sheet feed glass is the biggest problem.
I tend to leave the colour settings alone for normal full colour TIFF output, but if I just have simple black and white pages of text, I will enable the white colour follow and save a highest quality jpegs.
I have a couple of these beasts (they are big, bulky and very heavy) that I picked up off ebay and downloaded the software from the Fujitsu website, and run them off of a laptop using Vista, so presume the software will run on Win7 as well.
mellow-yellow wrote: I scan to B&W or possibly color, but always at 300DPI at high compression, then run Acrobat X's Clearscan (obviating ABBYY Finereader Pro).
Thanks for sharing this, I'm interested in the Clearscan thing... I red in some adobe tutorial that using 600dpi scan helps improving vector rendering without using much space.. have you tried to scan at that resolution? is it worth the extra time (if there is any)?
I would be a bit nervous about saving only a lossy format after destructively scanning a book. If it turns out later that there were problems, or if a better lossy format comes along, then not much can be done about that. I would save the raw scans to a non-lossy format (PNG, BMP, ...), and make the processed documents themselves as lossy as you like.
Did some product research on document scanners on newegg. My biggest result is price vs. PPM research.
Be careful with advertised ppm/ipm. IPM is *supposed* to be a standardized scan at 300dpi, but few of the scanners I've looked at actually advertised their ipm correctly. IPM is doubled for duplex scanners, so the most common claims you will find is 40ppm/80ipm due to it being a duplex scanner, but this 'fastest' value is usually at 150/200 dpi which is NOT the correct resolution for IPM.
Obviously an ADF (auto document feeder) is a must, but 'large' ADFs have a maximum capacity of 50-80 pages; not even a complete book. A DIY feeder capable of holding an entire book would be a huge improvement. Spring-lift and screw-lift both seem viable options. You might be able to hack a workstation printer's 500-page ream feeder.
All below listed ppms are based on advertised simplex values at 300dpi, a duplex page will double that as IPM. Nearly all document scanners offer duplex scanning, but double-check to make sure before purchase, there's a few oddballs.
Currently cheap-o scanners will run you 250-200 dollars, new. Offering ~20ppm. This is an excellent compromise for the price, and would be great for any office too. The only downside is that most offer meagre software support, and most are not designed for continuous heavy use.
There is a line of scanners in the 400-500$ range around ~40ppm. I don't recommend them, either you're going cheap or you have the money to burn on the next highest wicket. The only benefit here is you start to see additional features, like double-feed detection.
In the 750-900$ range you'll find 60ppm speeds. That's less than 5 minutes for most books. This seems like the sweet spot, and about every major brand has an offering here.
In the 1200-1400$ range you'll find slightly faster; around 80ppm. This is about as high as you can get speed-wise. But still the ADF is usually limited to 100 pages or less. Some of these even support A5 size scanning, which would be useful for engineering foldouts, maybe even textbooks if you would remove the binding without damaging the centerfold of pagepacks. Seems like a lot more work than just band-sawing the spine.
Significantly higher than that you'll find pedestal machines with all kinds of extra features or capability. The biggest upgrade here is a large-capacity ADF, but I don't really think it's worth it for 2500$. Some of these can even eke out even faster speeds, or have multiple scanners built into the stack.
Last edited by zerohourrct on 17 Sep 2015, 20:57, edited 1 time in total.
It would be really nice to have some feedback on software support for the various brands. The best resolution for printed books seems to be 300dpi, some high-quality picture books or magazines might warrant 600dpi. All but the cheapest scanners seem to offer 600dpi as a minimum. Easy selection between 600-300 dpi seems to be the important factor, single-button starting and hands-free uploading to drive is also a must. Post-processing could always be done using any desired third-party software, but that's a separate topic.
Scanning in 600dpi drops speed quite a bit. From my experience with Canon and Avision document scanners they are optimized for at most 300dpi speed wise. And normal use-case for them is scanning documents with compression enabled and less than 300dpi. So, if you want to get uncompressed data from scanner, you might hit some internal limits easier and you will get less than advertised or expected speed (A5 throughput is expected to be higher than A4 speed in specs).
For example, I have personally bumped into 20MB/s transfer limit for Canon DR-G1100, although USB 2.0 should achieve slightly over 30MB/s in real life. It means that I bumped into this internal limit when scanning ~A6 sheets in 300dpi duplex in full color and uncompressed (I had such specific requirements). I could get full feeding speed only when compression was enabled on scanner.
Also, anything you add in scanner settings that is processed on scanner itself, for example, in my DR-G1100 case it was auto size, can slow down scanning speed. And if scanner can't handle data wise full speed feeding (interface to computer or internal CPU limits), then it starts stopping and resuming cycle, which slows things even further.
I have use a Sharp MX 4101n office mashin for my privet work at the evning.
The best with this is that it take both side without extra handeling of the papershet.
It have two scanners! so I get both side in one sweep. It goes slower but that OK.
You cant use USB for big work. The maskin "hangs".
The PDF is prety smal. The color is normaly OK but you never know..