The new Microtek ScanMaker i320 scanner that I got today is really very nice. I’m glad I finally got fed up with the crappy old one that I never use because it always resulted in such awful scans. I scanned in some more halloween pictures (scroll down to hw2005-1 through hw2005-8) that one of Maggie’s friends took.
If you are worried that the reddish tinge to the pictures and dark backgrounds are artifacts of the scanner, no the prints actually look that way. The prints have a slightly matte finish to them so I had to turn on descreening to get rid of the noise that created, but otherwise I didn’t fiddle with the settings much. If you look at the full res scan you can even see the dust on the prints.
My one complaint is that the scanner gui comes up in basic mode at first and there’s a tiny inconspicuous and incomprehensible icon next to the minimize/maximize/close buttons that switches it into advanced mode. It took me forever to figure out that was how I could get out of the scanning for morons mode. Other than that it’s pretty good. It came with a transparency adapter for slides and negatives but I haven’t tried that out yet.
my not so new camera, casio z750, has this mode that makes taking pictures of a picture a cinch. basically it bends all that trapezoidal deformationg back into nice rectangles. it works surprisingly well, though the max resulting resolution is only 1600×1200 (z750 is 7mp)
I’m sure this can be done easily in photoshop too but it is nice to have that right out of the camera. certainly I found a surprise use for it when I ‘scanned’ tons of my aunt’s pictures while in dc.
anyway, I can’t magine myself scanning pics with a scanner now. I get paranoid enough with scanning docs (for archival) already.
(http://livejournal.com/users/scrungew00t)
That’s a pretty cool feature. Scanning is a pain in the butt, but you get better resolution that way.
(http://livejournal.com/users/jlick)