[sane-devel] offtopic 35-mm scanner question

[Miguel Bazdresch]

On 10/20/05, Alan Corey <alancorey at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'd have to pretty much agree with breacher even though I'm not familiar with
> the Epson Perfection 2400 and I'm a newbie with SANE.  I've got one flatbed
> scanner with a transparency adapter built in, and it makes me wonder why they
> bothered except as a marketing tactic.  It's about useless.

I have an Epson 2480 and I'm quite satisfied with it. I haven't used
it for negatives, only slides; for many purposes the results are quite
good. Some random thoughts:

* Sane support is very good, but native support (in windows) is still
better. In particular:
    The windows driver detects and crops the slide area; under sane, you have to
    manually crop the slide mount.
    The windows driver supports 16 bit per channel, and this really
makes a difference
    for high-quality scans.

* Having said that, working in xsane is infinitely more comfortable
than the obnoxious Epson software under windows.

* Flatbed scanning is slow. Not just the scan itself, but the process
of placing the slides, cleaning the scan surface, opening and closing
the lid.... it quickly adds up. If the archive is very large, the time
savings of a batch scanner could be worth the extra money.

* For a large archive, I'd even look into spending the money in having
somebody else do the scanning, a large photo shop or somebody else who
can do a high-quality job.

In short, for web posting and small prints I find the 2480+sane to be
an exceptionally good combination for the money.

Just my 2 centavos,

--
Miguel Bazdresch