[G4] USB Scanner Purchase

[Cathy Flick]

>I would like to purchase a medium quality USB scanner..

I'm on a G4/400 MHz/OS 9.1 and have been very happy with the Canoscan 
N650U usb scanner I purchased in Feb 2001 for under US$100. It's very 
thin, but long enough to handle legal size/European A4 sheets as well as 
US letter size. No power supply of its own, so it's very light. I have 
very little room on my desk and only use it occasionally, so I keep it in 
its original box on the floor (resting on the small-footprint side of the 
box), and it doesn't seem to mind, and it's easy to whisk out of the box 
and plug in for use. I can even hold it on my lap if necessary. (I have 
found that it also can sit nicely on a pile of books on a chair next to 
me, if I watch out for the feline assistants, or even fit right into my 
keyboard drawer with enough room to take pages in and out.) I taped a 
piece of paper onto the top with the basic scanning instructions so I 
don't forget between uses. More precisely, so I can be reminded, since I 
DO forget between uses...

The quality of the scan seems good enough for my purposes. I use it 
mostly for ocr'ing technical texts in various languages (I'm a scientific 
translator, physics and chemistry) and so usually scan docs at 300 dpi. I 
don't do color scanning, just grayscale. It's not superspeedy, but speedy 
enough if I get into the rhythm of taking the page out just after it 
finishes the scan and is starting its return trip, and then adjusting the 
new page; by then, it's ready to scan again. I'm probably the 
rate-determining step.

The image processing software that comes with it is good enough also - I 
can just hit return a couple of times and put each page into a folder, 
ready to be loaded into my ocr program. By the way, anyone who has 
OmniPage Pro 8 or whatever the old latest mac version was as their ocr 
software is well-advised to get the latest OmniPage Pro X, which will run 
in OS 9 as well as OS 10 - it is amazingly more accurate and (using the 
same scanner) has saved me immense amounts of cleanup time, paying for 
itself many times over so far.

I don't know how the CanoScan does on color images, but once I needed to 
scan my driver's license for a banker instead of using a copy machine, 
and the banker was quite impressed with the quality of the scan - it 
really did look quite clear. I have a 1200 dpi printer, however, which 
probably makes the most difference in how such things look.

I haven't tried faxing from it yet, although the software supposedly 
allows for that. But I've always considered it as a backup for my fax 
machine, even if I just scan images and then fax using my faxSTF (which 
can fax from any application).

The only other flat-bed scanner I had was the scsi Microtec X6, which I 
used on an 8600 mostly (OS 7 or 8). I just recall having endless problems 
with the software and also finding the software rather clunky. I've had 
no problems at all with the CanoScan software. I don't know how the scan 
quality compares.

However - you should always check for reviews of the latest version 
before purchasing. Sometimes these gadgets become less handy in later 
models.... 

                       Peace, Cathy Flick cathyf at infocom.com