Can you recommend a scanner?

Cannon or Lexmark should do just fine

I have tested quite a few (part of my job) and have settle on the Epson V700/750 as the ideal photographic scanner. I has replaced my dedicated Nikon as it is more versatile and gives consistently better results. I don’t know how fragile your bank is, but it is reasonably priced here (Australia).

Oh drat. Well, if you ever want to scan documents, really, really, really fast, get the Fujitsu SnapScan. It’s amazing.

@andrew – I have looked at the SnapScan a couple of times because it is reputed to be fast and portable. But have read many bad reviews by purchasers. Good to hear that you are happy with it, I will rethink it again.

@rooeytoo Really? When i bought it I saw only glowing reviews, and I’m one of them. Amazingly, and I mean amazingly fast scanning. I’m talking double sided documents at the speed it take a printer to feed a blank sheet of paper through.

@andrew – I am incorrect, it was the IRIScan portable scanner on the Apple site that received the bad reviews. I have not seen anything on the SnapScan. It is $510.00AUD, so probably not too many out there yet at that price.

Good to hear you are pleased with it, I will consider it if the price comes down a little.

When I use my desktop scanner, I use it through Photoshop and produce a jpg file, what sort of file does the SnapScan produce?

I’ve found Epson to be the most durable in a lab environment, and they produce excellent results. Scanners that are good at ripping through text documents quickly do not necessarily do very good at all with photos. Good photo scanners require the ability to maintain detail in shadow areas. The D-Max (dynamic range) value indicates how well they do at that. The rating goes from 0 to 4. 4 would be considered perfect. Unfortunately, most scanners have a very poor DMax and the vendors do not publicize the number.

Second to DMax value, consider optical resolution. Some scanners boast a very high resolution, but it may be obtained through software interpolation, not actual image information captured. An optical resolution of at least 2400×2400 ppi would be good.

Finally, avoid scanning to jpeg. Jpegs compress image info with a lossy algorithm. That is, file size is made smaller by sacrificing image quality. Save to lossless TIFF, PDF or PSD. You can then compress by saving as Jpeg later if needed.