![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
A Scanner Badly
My 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.
Here's a picture of my grandmother, photographed in sunlight with my ipad pro camera (the best camera I own):
Here's that same photo as scanned by the Scansnap ix1600. My grandma has been turned into a neon pink alien:
Other photos came out just as bad, this is just the picture that was on top of the pile in the shoebox when I started writing this rant and needed to scan some examples. I tried everything, including using the other driver for the scansnap (there are two, because reasons, I guess?). I looked and looked through the settings of both drivers for some kind of colour correction tickybox like you find on every flatbed scanner I have ever owned. There was nothing that had an effect on the colours.
I did more research. I learned about the alphabet soup of scanner image sensor technology: CCD (as used in older scanners of the oughts) and CIS (as used by the scansnap, the epson fastfoto, my flatbed, and just about any other scanner you can buy today). CCD is far more colour accurate, but CIS costs less, so it's become difficult to find a CCD scanner nowadays, aside from some of the more expensive flatbeds.
My flatbed uses CIS, and I know that if use manual mode and turn off a particular default setting in the driver, it produces awful colours. With the default setting, though, it's fine. Here's grandma as scanned by my flatbed. There's some pinkening compared to the original, but it's acceptable:
But the scansnap didn't have any accessible colour correction settings - because it's engineered to churn out scans quickly, and taking time to colour correct the output would slow things down, so you are trapped with whatever shit the cheap sensor spits out. The target audience of the scansnap don't care about colour accuracy - they just want to be able to digitize stacks of paper, and for that, it works marvellously. But for photos? No fucking way.
I did more searching of reddit threads, and found that there was a scansnap scanner that used CCD sensors back in 2009: the Scansnap S15000m. That's the scansnap that everyone on reddit was enthusing about for digitizing pictures. I found a page that compared its output to that of other scanners and gave it a thumbs partially up - it wasn't as good as a CCD flatbed, but it looked close. Since I'm not looking for perfection but for something that can go through a shoebox of pictures quickly and have *acceptable* results, it looked OK.
The old scansnap is obviously no longer made. But, as an indication of just how much better it is than the current scansnap, you can still buy new old stock s1500m's - if you're willing to pay far more than you'd pay for a new one (the going rate for "new" seemed to be $700). Or you can buy refurbished ones for $300-ish. Used ones are of course also available for quite a bit less, if you're willing to risk it.
Fortunately, used ix1600's sell for $350-ish. So, switching to a decade old scansnap will be close to revenue neutral. I lucked out and found a "never opened, never used" s1500m on ebay for $300, bought it, and it arrived today. Here's its scan of grandma:
That's extremely close to the actual photo, and even better fidelity than my flatbed (I have added an old CCD flatbed to my christmas wish list). Now I can start working through those shoeboxes.
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.
Here's a picture of my grandmother, photographed in sunlight with my ipad pro camera (the best camera I own):
Here's that same photo as scanned by the Scansnap ix1600. My grandma has been turned into a neon pink alien:
Other photos came out just as bad, this is just the picture that was on top of the pile in the shoebox when I started writing this rant and needed to scan some examples. I tried everything, including using the other driver for the scansnap (there are two, because reasons, I guess?). I looked and looked through the settings of both drivers for some kind of colour correction tickybox like you find on every flatbed scanner I have ever owned. There was nothing that had an effect on the colours.
I did more research. I learned about the alphabet soup of scanner image sensor technology: CCD (as used in older scanners of the oughts) and CIS (as used by the scansnap, the epson fastfoto, my flatbed, and just about any other scanner you can buy today). CCD is far more colour accurate, but CIS costs less, so it's become difficult to find a CCD scanner nowadays, aside from some of the more expensive flatbeds.
My flatbed uses CIS, and I know that if use manual mode and turn off a particular default setting in the driver, it produces awful colours. With the default setting, though, it's fine. Here's grandma as scanned by my flatbed. There's some pinkening compared to the original, but it's acceptable:
But the scansnap didn't have any accessible colour correction settings - because it's engineered to churn out scans quickly, and taking time to colour correct the output would slow things down, so you are trapped with whatever shit the cheap sensor spits out. The target audience of the scansnap don't care about colour accuracy - they just want to be able to digitize stacks of paper, and for that, it works marvellously. But for photos? No fucking way.
I did more searching of reddit threads, and found that there was a scansnap scanner that used CCD sensors back in 2009: the Scansnap S15000m. That's the scansnap that everyone on reddit was enthusing about for digitizing pictures. I found a page that compared its output to that of other scanners and gave it a thumbs partially up - it wasn't as good as a CCD flatbed, but it looked close. Since I'm not looking for perfection but for something that can go through a shoebox of pictures quickly and have *acceptable* results, it looked OK.
The old scansnap is obviously no longer made. But, as an indication of just how much better it is than the current scansnap, you can still buy new old stock s1500m's - if you're willing to pay far more than you'd pay for a new one (the going rate for "new" seemed to be $700). Or you can buy refurbished ones for $300-ish. Used ones are of course also available for quite a bit less, if you're willing to risk it.
Fortunately, used ix1600's sell for $350-ish. So, switching to a decade old scansnap will be close to revenue neutral. I lucked out and found a "never opened, never used" s1500m on ebay for $300, bought it, and it arrived today. Here's its scan of grandma:
That's extremely close to the actual photo, and even better fidelity than my flatbed (I have added an old CCD flatbed to my christmas wish list). Now I can start working through those shoeboxes.
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).
no subject
no subject