Fastest scanner on a budget?

September 5, 2007 3:30 AM

What's the *fastest* scanner I can buy for under $100 (can stretch to $150 if necessary)? Looking to scan mostly sheet music at high resolution. A document feeder would be excellent but I realize that's asking a lot for the price. New is preferred, used/ebay is ok for the right piece. Speed is the most important (as long as quality isn't seriously diminished)
posted by Alabaster to computers & internet (6 comments total)

The Fujitsu 4120c is a darn nice little scanner that will sheet feed up to 25 pages, duplex, color at 600 dpi and runs at a decent clip. It will also set you back $450.

Under $100 you are looking at toy-store quality flat beds that are slow as dogs and come with bloated software.

You might find an older medium end scanner like this, but beware the shipping costs and beware of obsolete devices with interfaces that you probably won't have (notably SCSI).
posted by plinth at 8:25 AM on September 5, 2007

Yeah, for under $100, speed isn't really an option. High res scanning is slow anyway. I'd look at whatever Canon, HP or Epson have in your price range, there's not going to be a huge difference.
I'd be a little leery of buying anything used. Lot's of small moving parts. The cost of fixing it will be more than you paid for it.
Have you considered doing at Kinko's or eqivalent?
posted by doctor_negative at 9:18 AM on September 5, 2007

I once picked up a fairly-decent HP ScanJet 5590 (which has a sheet-feeder) from CompUSA's 'bargain' table. It didn't come with an AC adapter and I think I paid $45. It's not terribly fast and the software makes me want to stab people, and the sheet-feeder results in slightly (1-2 deg) crooked scans...but it works.

I'd keep an eye on the open-box tables at all the local electronics stores; scanners are one of those items that tend to get slightly-damaged pretty easily, and sometimes you can find one that's fixable or just has missing replacable parts, for cheap.

But aside from an oddball bargain like that, you're not going to get a real sheet-feed scanner for under $100.

What you MIGHT be able to find, though, is one of those low-end multifunction machines that includes a sheet-feeding scanner, for somewhere in the $100-200 range. The software they come with tends to be really, really terrible, but it might do what you want. Keep an eye out for rebates and deals, and if you can find one, get one that will work with third-party software (VueScan, OmniPage, etc.). They sell those machines for cheap because they expect to make money up on the ink carts later; as long as you never print with it, you might get a scanner at what amounts to a subsidized price.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:24 AM on September 5, 2007

Example: the HP Officejet 5610 has a 25-sheet ADF and currently sells for under $90 at Amazon. It has drivers for both Mac and Windows (sadly, no Linux, but there are virtually no MFPs that work with Linux).

From personal experience I can tell you that the HP software is really terrible, but it's better than some other manufacturers' crap. It usually works in the barest sense of the term, and that's all I've come to ask from bundled scanner software. Just don't run it while you have anything important going on elsewhere on your computer, in case it crashes it.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:32 AM on September 5, 2007

I'm running a HP 6210, it has a doc feeder, and (although i'm using vista), I didn't have to install anything, it just works. I can scan to windows fax and scan, acrobat, photoshop, whatever.

It's fast with black and white, maybe 4-5 pages a minute SLOWEST.
posted by TomMelee at 9:48 AM on September 5, 2007

Many print houses have suuuper high speed scanners, that can scan black and white in pretty good quality (it's just as good, basically, as having a copy made) at ridiculous speed -- we're talking 100 pages per minute or more.

They're used to scan in hard copy jobs so that any set-up for print may be done digitally.

If you are going to be using this for a one off project, or maybe some projects that are only going to be done infrequently, you might consider dropping your originals off at a print house to have them scanned.

The place I worked would do black and white scan to PDF for 25 cents a page, and a CD burn for 5 dollars. This can vary wildly, though. At this price, 500 pages plus a CD burn would run you about 130 dollars plus tax. If you need anything odd, (like anything besides PDF file format, or individual PDF files for hundreds of different tiny projects, or any sort of retouching...) the price would quickly skyrocket. For 25 cents a page we'd just drop it in the hopper, hit the scan button, and burn the resultant 500 page PDF to a CD, if that makes sense. Obviously, the pages would have to be loose (no staples, glue, paperclips, post-it notes, butterfly clips, twine, etc...).

If you do decide to take your material to a print shop, I highly recommend getting a proof done so that you can make sure that the scan quality is to your satisfaction. The whole process might take a couple days, but it might beat having to scan each piece by hand and wrangling with whatever crappy software comes with the scanner.

[Also, if the material is copyrighted you'd need a release from the publisher.]
posted by ZeroDivides at 9:48 AM on September 5, 2007