What Scanner Should I Buy?

I would agree and is no issue with my system. I only mention it as a consideration as we don't know how much the user has.

Footballphilately, With all respect, you will never complete such a task unless all your stamps fit into a matchbox, so to speak.

All these ideas are far easily said than done in real life.

theres a canon one on Amazon for 50 bucks--I love it

Hello All,
I'm in the market for a new scanner as well. My old Dell desktop harddrive just croaked and my old scanner doesn't have drivers I can use on my newer laptop. My old scanner is a UMAX Astra 3400 and it still works after 12 years, but just not compatible with newer operating systems. I could switch the master and slave hard drives in the old desktop and reinstall the old operating system, but it's time for an upgrade and trying to figure out what I want that works best for 500+ scans per day.

Now I already have a Canon from the Lide series - I don't like it for several reasons. It's so light and the little rubber feet are so small, that when you push the scan putton you push it across the desk. It also starts scanning from the side towards me instead of from the back of the scanner. That means you have to place items upside-side down on the scanner bed which is awkward. Then there's the software - PhotoStudio. It's slow to scan each item and navigation through the menus is also slow to crop and save as files. The worst is the view - if you are scanning many, many items, it overlaps the individual pictures as a "cascade". I don't want that. I want software that allows me to see rows of individual thumbnails scans in the order that I scan them. I want the view like you can see photos in Windows explorer or even the image search of Yahoo or Google. No overlapping nonsense.

I do not want an all-in-one machine. I'm going to be scanning covers more than anything else. It's rare that I print anything and fax what these days?

There's not much on the floors of stores these days in terms of selection. UMAX and Visioneer scanners have disappeared. There's very high ends ones - online, but too expensive for my purposes (I did see a $16,000 professional scanner from Kodak online).

That leaves Epson. At the local Staples, I looked at the V30 and V300. The cover of those scanners opens from left to right. That's too awkward to use.
I also looked at the V500 which is the only model I've personally seen that might work. The floor model was broken - the tabs to hold onto the white portion under the cover were cracked off, but shoppers are rough so not going to hold that against it.

Actual questions about the Epson V500:

Where does the scanner start scanning? From the back of the scanner or from the front?

As for the software, if you create many scans in one sitting, how are they displayed? Can you have a tile view - rows upon rows of small thumbnails like the Windows Explorer view?

In the software, can you right click on the mouse buttom to crop after you made your selection from the image?

Can you set the default save for files as .jpg and it will stay that way for all the images you want to save? (one thing I dislike about the software for the UMAX - you had to select .jpg for every scan when I renamed them).

Thanks for any help to answering my questions!

Will

With regard to your Epson concerns, the software potentially renders moot the left/right opening and front/back scanning issues. I'm assuming you're judging left/right/front/back by the placement of the scan button on the scanner, but the Epson software is such that you might never use the buttons on the scanner (I've scanned hundreds of thousands of images on mine, and I couldn't tell you what a single button on the scanner does). So, you can position the scanner in whatever orientation works for you without concern for needing to reach the buttons.

The software allows you to preview the entire bed and draw select boxes around individual items. Then, when you scan, each select box is saved as a separate image file. This alleviates the need to scan the entire bed, then extract out the individual images.

Typically, I have mine set to dump the individual images in a single folder, where they are automatically saved with sequential numbers and jpg extention. Once in that folder, they are viewable just as any other group of images would be in Explorer.

I don't preview my images and prefer to use the scan button on the scanner. Normally, I can make hundreds of scans and not touch the computer once. I operate the scanner as if I was using a photocopier. After all the scans are done, then I go back to the computer to crop, rename and save as a .jpg file.

The scanner has to sit to the left of me when I'm at my computer desk as I don't have any other spot for it and that's why the V30/V300 models from Epson won't work. It's a tight space and can't turn it sideways either. The V500 model does open from the front instead of the side so that ergonomic problem is solved. At which end of the V500 scanner does it start scanning?

I'm concerned as to where the scanner starts scanning as with the Canon it's the reverse of the Umax. Because the scanner starts from the front, you have to place the item backwards otherwise you image will come out upside down. You can rotate the image of course, but an unnecessary step I rather not take.

I'm not trying to scan multiple items on the bed at once as most of the time its covers which may take most of the bed space. I can see where that would be great idea for a whole stock sheet of individual stamps or small sets. The idea of sequential numbers is nice if it's one photo per lot and you can pick the starting number, but I might have multiple items with multiple scans per lot with only one number per lot and letter suffixes for differentiate the photos. I don't think the preview and setting the scan areas is what I'm after.

I'm glad to see that all the photos are grouped in the tile view like Windows Explorer unlike Canon's cascade view which is unworkable for large number of photos. That was probably my major concern.

Thanks for the information.

Will

I went ahead and bought the Epson V500 scanner off of Amazon for $139 and change. Amazon has better prices than Staples or Best Buy. I didn't go with the lower models due to how the lid opened - awkward and didn't work with my workspace.

I gave the new scanner a good test run today with about 200 or so scans. I'm scanning only covers at this point and have the settings at 300dpi. I don't think I need anything higher since it's all for Internet use only.

Installing the software took some time - had to be patient. It's was working even if it didn't look like it.

You can set the file where you want to pictures saved which is a nice feature and it saves them to the file format you want (my old one didn't). You can set the saved file names as a series img001, img002, etc. That doesn't work for what I do, but it's easily changed in the file folder. The scanning speed seems to be quick even with the little thumbnail preview. The preview is helpful to spot potential problems mentioned below.

I really like the idea of the auto crop feature in the full auto mode, but it does need tweaking. I set the cropping border to max which helped to prevent it from cropping too close. I still have run into the problem of edges/sides being cropped off if the envelope is very white with nothing written or printed on them. This seems to be a problem with some first day covers on very white paper envelopes, especially those with no cachet.

The scanner also has the ability to automatically scan multiple covers on the scanner bed as multiple files, but this can be hit or miss. Sometimes the scanner recognizes the separate covers and sometimes it doesn't. I've tried placing the covers at opposite ends of the scanner bed, but that doesn't even work. Again the whiter the paper the more of a problem. It doesn't seem to be a problem with postcards, colored paper or any older covers with age toning. The other problem with really white covers is sometimes the scanning program wants to turn one cover into two separate image files in the full auto mode - the cachet as one image and the stamp with the postmark as another image. These problems doesn't happen with every cover, but hard to predict if it will happen or not.

I'm not sure how to tweak it in full auto mode to prevent the above problems, but I can switch it to professional mode and have the whole bed scanned as one image and just crop it manually in the file folder. I rather not as that just eats up more time as the Windows cropping tool is awkward to use - dragging four different edges as opposed to simply dragging an adjustable box from one corner diagonally to the other corner.

Overall, I'm sure I'll get use to it. I'm glad Epson makes a better scanner than printer. The old Umax and the piece o' junk Canon scanners will get a new home at the local thrift store.

Epson flatbed scanners are in fact the best in my book. Canon is OK. HP is crapola...