Legal size scanner?

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.scanner (More info?)

I'm looking for a legal sized scanner. Which one should I buy? My budget is
within $250 or so. My main focus is OCR. So, my main concern is speed, and
line art scanning quality.

What scanner would you recommend? I found refurbished UMAX Astra 4000U for
$50, but it appears to be very old. I wonder if UMAX has continuous support
for it with Win 2K, XP, Win 2003, etc... How about the speed and quality?

Thanks for the information,


cpliu

 

[Erik]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.scanner (More info?)

In article <Xns9556A0D5B9D69chanciusliuDeleteThi@130.133.1.4>,
cpliu <chanciusliuDeleteThis@yahoo.com> wrote:

> I'm looking for a legal sized scanner. Which one should I buy? My budget is
> within $250 or so. My main focus is OCR. So, my main concern is speed, and
> line art scanning quality.
>
> What scanner would you recommend? I found refurbished UMAX Astra 4000U for
> $50, but it appears to be very old. I wonder if UMAX has continuous support
> for it with Win 2K, XP, Win 2003, etc... How about the speed and quality?
>
> Thanks for the information,
>
>
> cpliu

Looks like Microtek still makes legal size scanners...

http://www.microtekusa.com/corp.html

I had one of their older ones a couple of years ago... it was ok I
guess... didn't do any OCR with it, but don't think it would have been a
problem.

I really know very little about OCR, and have almost no experience with
it. However, I've heard good software makes it a snap... and the cheap
stuff will make you drink. I think the OCR software often included with
scanners is of the later variety.

IIRC, Wayne Fulton has a good bit on OCR on his web site... as with any
issue/question involving scanning, I'd read it first.

http://www.scantips.com

(His book, which is basically just the printed up website is worth every
cent he gets too. I'm just a satisfied customer... Thanks Wayne!)

Good Luck!

Erik

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.scanner (More info?)

>>
>> cpliu
>
> Looks like Microtek still makes legal size scanners...
>
> http://www.microtekusa.com/corp.html
> ...
>
> IIRC, Wayne Fulton has a good bit on OCR on his web site... as with
> any issue/question involving scanning, I'd read it first.
> ...

Thanks for the links and suggestions. I will take a closer look at
Microtek's scanner. My current scanner is ScanMaker V6UPL. It works very
well, but it has a few drawbacks:
1) One minor software bug that the scan would become diagonal lines after
adjusting scanning area sometimes.
2) The glass is not as strong that if you press on it too hard for a long
period of time, the glass would disintegrated from the scanning bed.
After you have it glued back (by Microtek), The scanner may stop in the
middle or just stuck there for a few seconds before moving back.
3) Sometimes it would get stuck in the beginning of the scanning and
produces a scan with noise in the beginning and missing part in the end.
I wonder if there is some kind of lubricant I can use on the scanner.
4) It makes noise that sounds like it would break anytime soon after
using it extensively for over 1-2 years.

I have also used HP's scanners. They're stronger and sturdier than
Microtek's but I don't like their software. It's made with HTML. There
were scripting errors that I couldn't figure out and their support didn't
help either. Also their scanning software isn't as good and feature rich
as microtek's.

On OCR, I like FineReader a lot. Actually, I don't even ORC, I just keep
the images I scanned for reference or recordkeeping. For that, FineReader
creates TIFFs for each page you scan. You don't have to worry about if
the file would corrupt or lost if the it freezes, and it creates the
smallest possible B/W TIFFs.

Please let me know if there is a good legal size scanner you'd recommend.

cpliu