[X4U] sheetfed scanners

[Michael Elliott]

Jeff,

It works flawlessly for my use.  (We're talking the Brother MFC-3200c). 
  The drivers that came in the box were useless, but a quick visit to 
Brother's support site showed new drivers compatible with OSX 10.3.5.  
They actively advertise their OSX compatibility on the box, which is 
always a good sign.  (No "Mac compatible" afterthought sticker).

The scanner application that comes with the unit, Presto! Pagemaker (or 
Pagemanager?) is adequate, but I only used it once, and then went to my 
standby, GraphicConverter.  The interface is a TWAIN driver.  The 
options include a pre-scan, which lets you adjust contrast and 
brightness, but little else.  The scanner can go to 600x1200 dpi.  I 
can't remember how many bits it scans at, but I believe in the 40s.

This model is an inkjet, but they have laser models as well.

Using GraphicConverter, the file is scanned as a multi-page document (I 
don't know what the format is at that point...PICT?) and you then do a 
Save As...  as one of the gazillion formats that GC can output to.  So 
I choose PDF.  The Presto! Pagemanager software also does OCR.

How do you get Acrobat or another app to automatically OCR a file?  I 
notice that using my flatbed Canon LIDE 30 and Canoscan Toolbox, that 
the multi-page PDFs are already OCR text searchable in Preview when I 
open the files.  Any idea how to get that functionality with a 
3rd-party?

All in all, I've already gotten my money's worth from the unit, and I 
haven't even cracked open the ink cartriges.  If you plan to use it as 
a printer, i would be very cautious, after reading the tepid reviews of 
the PRINTER on amazon.com

Any more questions let me know...

Michael



On Sep 19, 2004, at 3:37 PM, Jeff Carruthers wrote:

> Michael: I'd be interested in learning how easy the sheetfed scanner 
> is to use in OSX. I've been thinking about buying an all-in-one, but 
> the Brother machines I've looked only seem to be supported in OS9. 
> Also, is the printer an inkjet or a laser?
>
> I need to scan documents to pdf and then post them on our website, so 
> 200 or 300 dpi would be nice. I currently have an HP sheetfeed scanner 
> and I either scan directly to Acrobat or to tiff and then Omnipage, to 
> pdf. If the scan is good enough, I then use Acrobat to then do an OCR 
> capture, so the documents have text as well as image.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Jeff