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Can your scanner scan black and white at 300dpi w/o fuziness?

T

Techie333

Platinum Member
I've got a memorex 6136U and I can't get it to scan in black and white only without getting fuzzy letters and numbers. When I want to scan a full document, the max it will allow me to scan at is 300dpi, but that should be more than enough to get clear letters! Is it just my scanner or what? I can't scan any black and white documents for "faxing, filing, or copying" without getting the fuzzy letter and bad resolution look.
 
I do but my printer uses color ink cartridge when it prints in grayscale! It would just be easier to have a complete black and white copy instead of going into settings and changing it to use grayscale or print black and white only......
 
Even if you choose print black and white in the printer settings? Usually that makes it so it doesn't use the color cartridge.
 
At 300dpi, text will be fuzzy. Ink bleeds. Unless you're trying to scan film, it's just one of the properties of paper.
 
Originally posted by: notfred
At 300dpi, text will be fuzzy. Ink bleeds. Unless you're trying to scan film, it's just one of the properties of paper.
Click to expand...

I think what he's referring to is the inherent problems of scanning in 1-bit.

Viper GTS
 
Speaking of scanning, what should I scan my wedding pictures at? I've got 5x7 proofs as well as the negs. I've got an Epson 636 that does decent scanning. Any benefits by getting some sort of negative scanner?
 
That's just how dithering is.

You could try to scan in grayscale, and have the printer do the dithering (see Printer properties, choose B&W instead of color), but I doubt it makes much difference whether the dithering is done by the scanner (or scanner driver), imaging software, or printer (driver). But this way, you can keep quality images for filing.

I generally scan documents for archival at 8-bit, 300dpi with very good results.


Hossenfeffer,

I'm not a scanning expert, but wouldn't you want to scan at the highest quality settings possible? If you're scanning the proofs, you can do 24-bit, 600dpi (or 1200dpi for many scanners) and output to TIFF instead of JPEG. Realize each image will be quite slow. I believe technically, scanners are 48-bit, but the output image is 24-bit aka TrueColor.

I have even less knowledge of negatives, but I seriously doubt any SOHO negative scanners will be any good for archival scanning. Is it feasible/affordable to rent a quality (commercial) unit for the job?*

I think the best option here is to get Kodak PhotoCD. Note I learned not so long ago that Kodak Picture CD is a low-grade, consumer option. I don't remember exactly, but image resolutions for Picture CD are approx. 800x600. PhotoCD is significantly higher. If your studio doesn't offer PhotoCD, I can't imagine why you couldn't take the negatives to a shop that would cut you PhotoCD disks at a reasonable price. It'll save you a lot of effort compared to scanning it yourself.

As for Picture CD, it's fairly low-res, but still worth the $5 you spend, considering the time saved scanning prints for all but the most important occasions. The JPEGs are more than adequate for web images.

*For example, the following film scanner is almost $2 Gs.

http://www.microtekusa.com/as120tf.html
 
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