fastest scanner available

[chuckieland]

i was wondering, what's the fastest scanner available
i just brought a cannon usb scanner Lide 30
and it's slowwwww
when you give me the brand and model, can you also give me the time it need to scan too

 

[Nebor]

Get a digital camera! = teh instant scan w/ flash!

 

[bacillus]

what do you consider as slow?

 

[WarCon]

The 2.0 Visioneers (9020's and a 9032) I have installed lately seem really fast to me, but I am basing my judgement on older USB scanners. The last person I suggested a Visioneer (just went and bought it and installed it themselves) called me telling me they hated it and was going to throw it away or take it back. I went over and within 5 minutes I was showing them how good it really is (scanned a 35mm filmstrip in at 2700 dpi) and printed a picture that was as good as any photo from that scan. Now they are in love with it, now that they know how to use it. (Had to manually configure One-touch buttons, was only problem)

I have no experience with any other USB 2.0 scanners. I only recommend what I know works......

Scanning at 2700 dpi took about as long as a normal scan (300 dpi) on a USB 1.1 scanner. It will typically preview scan in 3-4 secs. Scanning is usually faster, unless your scanning full page.

 

[chuckieland]

normal 300 dpi scan at 44mb and take 1 minute
is that a good speed
anyway to cut down the mb?

 

[bacillus]

don't have your scanner but you should be able to reduce the dpi somewhere in settings in the scanner program to reduce your file size!

 

[jacktesterson]

visioneers

 

[Sheriff]

Fastest Scanners available are SCSI's

 

[elbirth]

Originally posted by: Sheriff
Fastest Scanners available are SCSI's

Yeah..... I had to go work on a computer that was having issues recognizing a scsi scanner (an older fujitsu I think it was.... I later looked it up online, but forgot the model #.... it was like $2,500+ though). This thing had a feeder on it you put the paper on... from the time it grabbed it, pulled it through, to the time it showed the preview on screen was about 5-8 seconds... actually importing into Photoshop took like 20 seconds tops.

 

[WarCon]

The older SCSI scanners that I have had the (dis) pleasure of working on weren't as fast as the USB 2.0 Visioneers (displeasure usually because of trying to find/make an available IRQ). Granted I haven't worked on a $2000+ sheetfeed document scanner, but have worked on SCSI Hp's, Umax's and Microtek's and the Visioneer beats them all hands down (that was years ago though so memory and processor speed might of been some kind of limiting factor also).

Are there many new SCSI scanners?

 

[rjain]

Originally posted by: WarCon

Are there many new SCSI scanners?

Probably not many, but the professional quality ones are mostly SCSI, since they need the high bandwidth to transfer such large scans, and those systems usually already have fast SCSI disks anyway, so putting the scanner on the same bus can sometimes allow the CPU/RAM to not even get involved in the data transfer, making it twice as fast as it would be if transferring from one bus to another. Of course, this is the data transfer only, not the physical scanning process.

 

[WarCon]

Unless you go the professional route ($2000+), there are no SCSI scanners that have more bandwidth than USB 2.0 scanners. Traditional SCSI-2 (Wide/Fast) transfer rates are 3 times slower than USB 2.0.

I imagine Wide-Ultra3-SCSI cards are 2-3 more expensive than the visioneers, let alone the Scanner (probably the interconnect cable costs as much as the $129 9320 Visioneer..... ). The few high end SCSI scanners that I found on the net didn't show prices, so probably fall into that if you have to ask, then you can't afford it category.

 

[rjain]

U3W (160MB/sec = 1.28 Gb/sec) cards (they're typically dual channel) used to be about $150. they've probably come down in price since then.
BTW, that's not the bandwidth of the scanner internally, it's the bandwidth of the bus being used. As with hard drives, the bandwidth internally is probably far less than that, and higher for the pro SCSI models than for the amateur/consumer USB models. Not that that's the only benefit of scsi, since you also get more work done by the scsi controller instead of being done by the CPU and ability to share the bandwidth across multiple devices more effectively. Still, I would think that it's the rate of the optical scanning itself that is the limiting factor these days.

 

[rjain]

Originally posted by: rjain
U3W (160MB/sec = 1.28 Gb/sec) cards (they're typically dual channel) used to be about $150. they've probably come down in price since then.

Holy !@#*%*@#$(@#($!!!!

$84 for dual channel scsi 160. :Q

 

[WarCon]

Well USB 2.0 isn't too far behind that 1.28Gb/sec of the U3W. It comes in at a respectable 480Mb/sec (especially considering this is a serial transfer).

When we scanned a strip of film in at 2700dpi, the data transfer (maybe within the scanner) was the limiting factor not the mechanical scan speed though. For the average document scans, I am sure the stepper drive was moving the light bar assembly as fast as it can go though.

 

[rjain]

Originally posted by: WarCon
Well USB 2.0 isn't too far behind that 1.28Gb/sec of the U3W. It comes in at a respectable 480Mb/sec (especially considering this is a serial transfer).

Heh, that's like saying that PC66 RAM isn't too far behind PC2700... Dunno what being serial or not has to do with how fast you can transfer.

When we scanned a strip of film in at 2700dpi, the data transfer (maybe within the scanner) was the limiting factor not the mechanical scan speed though. For the average document scans, I am sure the stepper drive was moving the light bar assembly as fast as it can go though.

I can understand that film scanning will be limited by the data transfer, as there's not much to move.

If you're saying that scanning of full 9x12 or larger pages is limited by the transfer, then that's pretty interesting. Let's see how much data it needs to transfer when scanning at 2000 dpi and 36 bit. That's 18000x24000 pixels x 36 bits/pixel = 14.5 Gb. Should take no more than 15 seconds on scsi, which is a while, but not much longer than the physical time to scan the document, I'd figure. However, I don't know how fast external SCSI devices usually go these days. Is it still around 40MB/sec?

Edit:
Reading your post again, I realize that you were agreeing that for full page scans, the data transfer isn't a big limitation.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: WarCon
Well USB 2.0 isn't too far behind that 1.28Gb/sec of the U3W. It comes in at a respectable 480Mb/sec (especially considering this is a serial transfer).

When we scanned a strip of film in at 2700dpi, the data transfer (maybe within the scanner) was the limiting factor not the mechanical scan speed though. For the average document scans, I am sure the stepper drive was moving the light bar assembly as fast as it can go though.

1.28GB/sec vs a max theoretical speed of 60MB/sec....close enough.
SCSI is usually a more professional (expensive) option; there's got to be some decent USB 2.0 scanners on the market by now. Can't say I know of any right away - I haven't shopped for any lately; my Artec 1236USB seems to do the job for me right now. I'm just sort of used to high-res scans taking a long time. It sure is faster than the Plustek FBIVP I had before - parallel port interface.

 

[Nebor]

My hp psc 2175 is USB 2.0... It doesn't seem painfully long in scanning. Takes about 30 seconds?

 

[WarCon]

The scan of the ~ 1 x 3 inch piece of film at 2700dpi is somewhere near 2.6 times bigger than a full page at 300dpi. The scan head was moving much slower across the filmstrip telling me that it was having a harder time transferring that data, than it does with the full page scan.

Thats what I was trying to say......

Ever scan a 5 x 7 at 2400 dpi?......... Lets just say you don't wanna try to do any fixes to that picture without several GB of ram.

 

[Nebor]

How can you set the precision of scanning?

 

[rjain]

Originally posted by: WarCon
The scan of the ~ 1 x 3 inch piece of film at 2700dpi is somewhere near 2.6 times bigger than a full page at 300dpi. The scan head was moving much slower across the filmstrip telling me that it was having a harder time transferring that data, than it does with the full page scan.

Thats what I was trying to say......

Ever scan a 5 x 7 at 2400 dpi?......... Lets just say you don't wanna try to do any fixes to that picture without several GB of ram.

If you can afford a $1500 scanner, you can afford $500 of RAM.

But still, I think we're comparing apples to oranges here. The file size is 2.6x larger and the scanned area is at least a dozen times smaller and the amount of precision needed in the optics and mechanics is 81x more...

 

[WarCon]

With their scan software, precision scan is HP's, one-touch is Visioneers and I forget what UMAX and Microtek call theirs.

There is always a dpi adjustment.

 

[WarCon]

Originally posted by: rjain

Originally posted by: WarCon
The scan of the ~ 1 x 3 inch piece of film at 2700dpi is somewhere near 2.6 times bigger than a full page at 300dpi. The scan head was moving much slower across the filmstrip telling me that it was having a harder time transferring that data, than it does with the full page scan.

Thats what I was trying to say......

Ever scan a 5 x 7 at 2400 dpi?......... Lets just say you don't wanna try to do any fixes to that picture without several GB of ram.

If you can afford a $1500 scanner, you can afford $500 of RAM.

But still, I think we're comparing apples to oranges here. The file size is 2.6x larger and the scanned area is at least a dozen times smaller and the amount of precision needed in the optics and mechanics is 81x more...

Yeah you may very well be right, that scan head may have been traversing slowly in order to achieve enough samples for the 2700 dpi scan and not from needing to transfer data. I personally was very impressed with that scan though. You could read the letters on a VCR behind the people in picture.