Scanner Advice

Hi everybody,

I'm hoping you folks might be able to help me out here. I'm looking to purchase a scanner, and I've narrowed my choices down to two and I was hoping you could give me your thoughts on each (or perhaps suggest another). I'm looking to spend around $100, and I mostly want to scan historical documents, as well as 3D objects, which I can work with in Photoshop.

My choices are either:

EPSON Perfection 3490

or

CANONSCAN 4200F

Any suggestions you can give me would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

As well as any responses you get here, you might check people's reviews on NewEgg.com. They do a good job of keeping people from rigging the user ratings/reviews, like can happen at some online retailers.

I've got a Canoscan 8400F (which goes for $125), and am quite happy with it, but the driver interface can be frustrating and is poorly documented. I assume this is the same driver that comes with the 4200F, and it takes a lot of headscratching and trial and error to figure out. I'd be interested to hear if Epson's driver is better.

The 8400F does a great job on reducing dust and scratches on negatives (it uses a seperate IR scan to detect them, I believe, and doesn't just 'noise reduce' them away). But for historical documents, that's probably not very useful.

I don't know what kind of 3D objects you expect to scan. If you want me to test-scan something, give me an example of what you wish to scan and I'll do a test-scan.

Hi, thanks for the help.

Yeah, I've checked out NewEgg, but I couldn't find any user reviews (virtually anywhere) regarding the Epson scanner, I'm guessing because it's so new.

In terms of scanning, I'm more interested in document scanning as opposed to photo scanning, and I'm not sure if one is better suited to that type of application.

Of 3D objects, I work with digital collage, and want to scan objects such as flower.

But I'd love to see a scan of text, such as from a newspaper or magazine.

Thanks for your help!

Hope all this is of use. These are as scanned, and the all the features of the scanner were turned off (Unsharp, auto color, etc.) except in the Nikon brochure where Descreen was turned on. All I did was scan, crop and resize. If you see any funny, brightly colored squiggles in close-up, it's probably teeny little ants crawling around on the scanner bed -- they make psychodelic trails!

A 4 meg full scan can be found here, you have to limbo through RapidShare to find the download link:

http://rapidshare.de/files/5449882/MagCover.jpg.html

Go to the bottom of the page and click on the FREE link, then wait 30 seconds or so for the actual download link to appear. Which will be "Download: MagCover.jpg". Click on that and you should get it.

Vintage newspaper scanned at 150 DPI. (I'm not making political comment, it's just an old newspaper I had.) Scanning a whole newspaper would not be fun:



White on black, and black on white text in a magazine-sized Nikon F4 brochure scanned at 300 DPI with Descreening on (the black burlap backgrond is in the original, and not a scanner effect):





Bad still life at 600DPI using AAA batteries as spacers to keep stuff from getting smooshed:



Bougainvilla Petal (it's very pale IRL) @ 6400 DPI:



Bougainvilla Petal 100% CROP:

Amazing! Thank you so much for all your help, I truly appreciate you taking the time to show me how your scanner works. This will certainly help me make a decision!

Do you guys think that the CANONSCAN 4200F can stack up at all to the 8400F? Do you think it's worth it to pay the extra for the 8400F? I'm so torn, it's difficult to choose!