[Ben Barker]

My old scanner finally crapped out. The light still comes on and everything, but now there are wavy lines all over the images. I used to be able to edit them out in Photoshop, but it's gotten to the point where I can't do that unless I repaint the whole image, or completely destroy it with adjustments. It was a piece of crap anyway. It was 50 bucks about 5 years ago. It took 5 minutes to scan a page, and sounded like a coffee grinder. I think now I'll spring for one in the $250-$300 dollar range.

Anyone have recommendations? I've always liked Epson products, but it doesn't look like I can get an Epson at a size over 8.5x11 without spending a fortune. What kind of scanner do you have, and what kind of experience has it given you?

[Snorkles]

Im sorry, I cant help u, but I just wanted to tell about a thing I did with my scanner a while ago: I took a bit of plastic(The one that you use to wrap food) and placed it on the scanner, and then I scanned my freinds headspressed against the plastic. They looked really funny in a kind of mongoloid way.

[Shadow-X-]

With newer and cheaper scanners coming out of every orifice on your body these days, I find it hard to choose. I had a Umax Astra 1200P, it was slow as a Ford Escort, and as loud as your mom giving birth. I gave the scanner to my sister, lol. So I went out and searched around, and bought a Hewlett Packard ScanJet 4300C. For $89, I'd say its great. I'm no expert in scanners, but it's quick & quiet like all the new scanners out there nowdays, and the scans look fine. Im not sure what the DPI resolution is onhand. I'm sure that any scanner you can get now will be of good quality, but this is coming from the non-elite artist. If you're looking for something that will scan larger than a regular letter-sized paper (8.5 x 11), and with good quality, I dunno.

The only problem with scanners that I have is that I never know what DPI to scan at to get a 1:1 ratio scan. Maybe I'm thinking about it all wrong, but I thought 100DPI was scanning something without "zooming" in on it, but whenever I try scanning a letter, the fineprint gets soo blurry, and anything larger than 100DPI and the picture gets too large for my 1024x768 rez screen, and I don't want to send oversized pics to the people I have to email for my parents all the way in Japan.

Sorry if this post was useless...

[Ben Barker]

Well, the DPI has no effect on the aspect ratio. It is the density of the image's pixels. It should probably be ppi, pixels per inch, but since printers use dots per inch I think the terms are interchangable now.

Your screen is 72 ppi, and it's not changing. So anything you scan at 100 dpi is still going to be enlarged on your screen, in order to match with the image. Sometimes the software just makes it 72 dpi and changes the dimensions of the image accordingly. I recommend scanning things at a higher resolution, like 300 dpi, then sizing them down in Photoshop to 72, and changing the size and whatnot. Unless you are running at some ungodly resolution the scan will be bigger than your screen most of the time, and you will have to size it down or zoom out. If you are going to print it, scan it at at least 300 dpi. Assuming your printer can handle it, the higher the better. Of course, the image will be huge on your hard drive and on your screen, but hey, that's how it has to be.

I checked out the scanner selections at the store where I work and they really sucked. Maybe I will just get a smaller scanner and spend the rest on an Epson 1280. But I hate scanning half of something, then the other half, then putting them together. Eh.