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A Scanner Badly
Jun. 25th, 2022 04:41 pmMy mother has a crapton of pre-digital photographs that she would love to have on her computer. I tried scanning some of them with my flatbed scanner. Hours later, I had made a tiny dent in a shoebox full of photos. I needed something faster.
I did research. The wisdom of the internet said "get a document scanner that can do photos." The Epson Fastfoto was mentioned, but it costs $600 - far beyond my or my mother's budget - and when I looked for actual, non-SEO, non-astroturfed reviews (by googling "epson fastfoto reddit"), the consensus was that it produced poor quality images, especially if the picture was dark.
Fujitsu scansnap scanners were mentioned as an alternative. After much more research, and on the basis of reddit comments and a review that certainly seemed to be real, with claimed actual testing of its photo scanning abilities that concluded it produced good quality scans, I bought a scansnap ix1600 earlier this year. Instead of $600, it was $400 - just barely affordable (my mom and I split the cost). I tested it, it worked, and I set it aside. This month, I finally got around to using it on a shoebox of miscellaneous pictures.
The results were... DIRE. ( Read more... )
In sum: Once again, capitalism has ruined everything. If you want to scan a ton of photographs without spending a fortune, find a working old scansnap s1500m. And then hit me up for the drivers - fujitsu says they will take the drivers down from their site at the end of this year (the drivers will live on on other, more ad-filled sites, of course).
I did research. The wisdom of the internet said "get a document scanner that can do photos." The Epson Fastfoto was mentioned, but it costs $600 - far beyond my or my mother's budget - and when I looked for actual, non-SEO, non-astroturfed reviews (by googling "epson fastfoto reddit"), the consensus was that it produced poor quality images, especially if the picture was dark.
Fujitsu scansnap scanners were mentioned as an alternative. After much more research, and on the basis of reddit comments and a review that certainly seemed to be real, with claimed actual testing of its photo scanning abilities that concluded it produced good quality scans, I bought a scansnap ix1600 earlier this year. Instead of $600, it was $400 - just barely affordable (my mom and I split the cost). I tested it, it worked, and I set it aside. This month, I finally got around to using it on a shoebox of miscellaneous pictures.
The results were... DIRE. ( Read more... )
In sum: Once again, capitalism has ruined everything. If you want to scan a ton of photographs without spending a fortune, find a working old scansnap s1500m. And then hit me up for the drivers - fujitsu says they will take the drivers down from their site at the end of this year (the drivers will live on on other, more ad-filled sites, of course).