A New But Old Scanner...

I love my Epson V500 that I use for all my stamp scanning. It provides greater surface detail than any of the (many) others I've tried over the years. That said, it falls down in two areas:

1. Oversized document scanning. An 8.5x11 bed isn't really large enough, especially when dealing with stocks, bonds, deeds, indentures, etc. I keep looking for a decent scanner though, as a digital camera is problematic with respect to lighting as well as dealing with documents that have been folded, curled, or otherwise will not lay completely flat.

2. Scanning a large number of sheets, i.e., scanning pages from a book or magazine. Using a traditional flatbed scanner for scanning a large number of pages, especially 2-sided pages, is a very slow, laborious process.

With respect to #1, I have tried any number of affordable 11x17 (tabloid/A3) scanners, e.g., Mustek, Plustek, as well as the 11x17 scanning bed on the Brother all-in-one 6720DW (now sitting unused in storage), and they are all craptacular. Very poor image quality.

So-called "professional" large format and duplexing document scanners are NOT cheap. About the only way a consumer can afford one is to buy on the used market. Normally I do not recommend buying older consumer-level scanners used, as they tend to be slow, CCD rather than LED, SCSI-only or USB1 communications, and frequently are incompatible with newer versions of Windows. However, professional scanners can be a different animal and usually have greater longevity as far as driver support, and are built more robustly to handle a heavier duty cycle.

After doing a fair amount of research and seeing what models are readily available on ebay, I settled on the Fujitsu 5750c. I took delivery of one yesterday and spent all evening putting it through its paces.








This model was sold from 2004-2007 and had a list price of $8,995. You can find them on ebay now for $350-600, depending on condition, whether they have all the trays, etc. It's incredibly heavy at approximately 80 pounds in weight.

This sounds like an ancient device, but it really isn't, at least with respect to feature set:

* Supports both Ultra-SCSI and USB 2 communications.
* LED (so fast warmup)
* Fujitsu has current drivers for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1
* Supported by VueScan

It's an interesting animal in that it has both a 12"x18" scanning bed, as well as a positionable duplexing document scanner with 200-sheet input tray. Optical resolution is 600dpi, which is low by today's standrds, but for document scanning and oversized items, is more than sufficient.

It will scan 2-sided documents at 50+ pages per minute from the document feeder.

Just some comments from working with it last night in no particular order:

* The preview when scanning from the bed is VERY fast. Quicker than I was expecting.

* Image quality, while not as good as my Epson, is far and away better than any of the other A3 scanners I tried.

* Using the TWAIN drivers to scan into Photoshop, and also using VueScan, resulted in a maximum image size on the flatbed of 11.7x17 inches, smaller than the max image size given in the specs. Using Fujitsu's Scandall Pro (free version) downloaded software, however, gave me a full 12"x18" image.

* Document scanning was hit or miss initially. Scanning directly into Adobe Acrobat Pro XI did not work well at all. The page size autodetection did not work at all, and even setting it to a discrete image size resulted in an offset in both X and Y directions that pushed the image off the page area. I was never able to resolve this. Using VueScan, however, the document scanning worked like a charm.

I did a LOT of trial and error last night (well more like error and error), but even with the learning curve I managed to get 2 complete issues of The American Revenuer from the 1970s scanned to searchable PDFs. 600dpi bitmap (monochrome) makes for very nice image quality, very accurate OCR, and relatively small filesize (each PDF is under 2MB for a 16-page issue).

The particular unit I bought showed a counter of just under 40,000 scans, which sounds like a lot... until you realize that the duty rating of this unit is 8,000 scans per DAY.

Overall I am very pleased.

Wow! A whole different animal. Thanks for the review.

I have an Epson V600, and agree the Epsons are very good indeed.

I recently changed scanners, not by choice. My current scanner is one that you describe as "craptacular". My last scanner was big and heavy, but it had a great software package and was fast with great quality. This is one that one of my kids had at college and I had to resort to this after the old one broke. Everything that made it great for a college dorm does not make it good for fast high resolution images to post items for auction. This weekend one of the leds burned out so I get a yellow vertical line 1" in from the far edge, so I have to keep all my scans to the left of that. So your post is very timely. I will be looking for a new scanner soon

This is way out of my league. I have a Canon printer and scanner and am satisfied with the results at least for now.
Tom

I have a scanner, printer and photocopier all in one Samsung SCX-4100, but the scanner now doesn't work. I don't think that it's a physical problem because it can still photocopy which requires the same parts as the scanner. It must be the scanning program which I have downloaded many times but it still seems stuck.

I like the slang craptacular. It has a stinging bite to it without being obscene or judgmental.
Tom

Great in-depth review. Thank you for taking the time to share your results with us.

revenuecollector,

Thanks for the review. I'd love to see some stamp scans. I'm not happy with my Canon LIDE 200's color reproduction.

These recent images are from the Epson V500, which is what I use for all my non-document scans.

This seems nice, however I would chack to see the the bulb is available and can be changed if needed. Many scanners do not have replacement bulbs.

WOW-----revenue ,those are neat scans ,can you post what special things you done to get that sharp of a scan on this board ,clearly very nice scans .

Your scans are always so bloody amazing,
absolutely superb.

A real pleasure for the eyes.

revenuecollector,

Beautiful scans! I thought I could reach toward my monitor and pick up that first one!

Here's a 600 DPI scan with my Canon LIDE 200 scanner. I'm never happy with the color reproduction, and the clarity falls short too.

I'd appreciate hearing other scanner recommendations. Here is another scan with my Canon LIDE 200 scanner. Again, washed out.

revenuecollector, your scanner produces beautiful results. I just don't know if I want a scanner that big.

@ Classic Coins, there have been a number of threads
already on SCF regarding scanners.

Here is one
https://goscf.com/t/30390&whichpage=1

plus you will find a few more that might help
using Search


BTW that revenue scan is quite good especially if you're
only using 600dpi.
I usually use 1200dpi on my Epson 4490 which is a fairly
ancient machine.