Got any advice on buying a scanner?

I currently own a Canon LiDE 80 Canoscan. It's not very big, and designed rather flat (and not very space consuming). It's served me well for about 15 months now, and the quality is quite nice - if you're looking to preserve non-photo blue as much as possible to seperate out later, this is adequate.

We went Epson, too. Our Epson 3200 does 48 bit at 4800dpi native and includes a slide scanner. Connections are Firewire and USB2. It's pretty fast using Firewire. Only 8.5 x 11 inch scan window, though.

i've had a Canon canoscan lide for a few years now. Cost me just over 100 bones. No problems, and when i say scan, she scans.

Most scanners nowadays are going to exceed requirements for most. Keep in mind 300 dpi is full colour print quality, and for B&W printing you don't need to go beyond 1200 dpi. If it's strictly for the web you don't need super high end...just get a trusted name that you recognize. If it's a Scanomatic (tm) scanotron with Scantastic Scantology, you may want to keep looking.

Wow, thank you for all the helpful replies. This forum is fantastic.
No, I should rephrase that: the people on this forum are fantastic, heh heh.

By the looks of things, it looks like pretty much everybody’s happy with their scanner, so I don’t really need to worry about accidentally getting a terrible one.

48-bit, 2400 dpi, flatbed seems to be the present norm, so I think I might get something along those lines.
If I can, I think I’ll get something with a scan surface larger than 8.5 * 11, because, well, I might as well. I didn’t actually know that scanners that big existed until this forum came along.

I’ll most likely head to Future Shop (or maybe CompuSmart) some time soon here to see if they’ve got scanners with those specs.
Sound good?

Again, thank you all very much for your help.

Hey hey,

I picked up an 11 x 17 scanner and it's worth it if you've got lots of pages to scan, assuming that you're drawing on 11 x 17 sheets. When we were doing Monk's Tale, issues 1 - 3 were scanned with a standard 8 1/2 x 11, and it was a pain because you had to reconstruct everything in photoshop. Not that big a deal if you had panels that were smaller than 8 1/2 x 11, but a pain if you had something larger like a full page spread.

We were getting ready to work on the Short Term Konsequences projects, and I really didn't want to try to piece all those pages from everyone together.

So, I did some research....at the time most 11 x 17 scanners start at about $1000 US, which was quite a bit, but then I found a company called Mustek that was selling theirs for $199 US. You can go to Mustek.com to check it out. They technically don't have distribution in Canada, and it took me a while to finally get a hold of someone there.

Their response was "uh, you're in Canada? Shipping's going to be expensive, like $60, are you sure you still want it?"

Of course when you look at $260 versus $1000, it's a pretty easy decision.

The scanner is USB, and full color too, and I believe can get up to 2400 DPI.

Hey dude,

okay, so a couple of answers....

it is a little slower for full color scanning, especially compared to my smaller 'regular' sized scanner. However, the vast majority is scanned as grayscale.

Now, a lesson on DPI. The first thing to consider is what your final output is, and what your initial input is. Technically, 300 PDI is really all you need. The vast majority of printers (as in Print houses, not the ones you hook up to your computer) can only print the equivalent of 300 dpi. If memory serves me correct, printers use LPI (lines per inch), and their screens/film is output at 150 LPI, which is roughly equivalent to 300 DPI. I'm told that the human eye can only see about a true 300 DPI anyways.

I will make one simple assumption here, and that is you're working on 11 x 17 artboard and shrinking it down to comic book size.

That being the case, you can scan your original sized art at 300 dpi. That's all you really need. Remember, your art will be shrunk down by about 63%, so that will also help to tighten your work. If you look at strictly the Monk's Tale stuff in short term konsequences and the regular mini-series, some of the stuff was originally scanned at 600 DPI, and some at 300 DPI. I'll bet you can't tell what's what.

I currently scan all of the finished original pages at 600 dpi, and all the rough versions at 300 dpi for all our stuff.

So why the heck the hoopla with all these high DPI with printers and scanners? Part of is marketing, but the other part is if you were to go the reverse of doing what we're doing for the comic book. For example, you have a 5 x 7 photo you want to turn into a huge poster. That's when you would need to scan something in at a high resolution.

That's where the whole knowing what your 'final output' is important. Make sense? It's really about what's being used for the final print. If you take a close look at the bus ads, you'll notice huge dots of CMYK. But those ads are designed to be seen from a distance, not up close.

If you're doing photocopies, the resolution is generally lower than 300, i'd say closer to 200. And of course web resolution is 72dpi. I think TV's 96dpi, but i can't remember.

I don't think there is a scanner out there on the market that doesn't exceed what a print shop's press can do.

Think of matching it to your lowest denominator, where everything else that's over and above is overkill.

The last thing to keep in mind is your file size. As an example, an 11 x 17 300 dpi grayscale image is about 12MB, while a 600 dpi version is closer to 50MB. Those are pretty big files. If your doing that in color, well it's a lot bigger, which means much slower processing time when you do your coloring and all that fun stuff. Again, all the guys will color their stuff at the original sized scan, shrinking it down is generally the last step.

Hope that helps dude!

Hi Gerald,

Nope, I don't have a timeline (Thank goodness, because I would have passed it long ago, heh heh).
I've got no problem waiting a while longer.

To be honest, though, I'm beginning to have second thoughts about an 11x17 scanner.
Originally, my logic was that I might as well get it, 'just in case'. And better to get it now instead of getting an 8.5x11 and then maybe ending up just getting an 11x17 some time down the road. Better to just get the big one and not limit myself for the future.

But I'm slightly hesitant about the resolution on this 11x17 scanner, in case I ever want to scan/print something life-size, without shrinking it down. And also (and probably more importantly), pretty much everything I draw is 8.5x11 or smaller anyway.

So, even though I'd love to have the immense, mighty surface area of an 11x17 scanner, I'm actually leaning more towards getting a piddly 8.5x11, with slightly higher resolution and maybe with a faster connection.


But, I'll wait and see if there's anybody else here who'd be interested in getting an 11x17 scanner. If we can get enough of a price break, then I could probably convince myself to just get it, heh heh.


So, yeah. That's what's going on in my muddled head.

CG,

My wallet took a major hit from the ACCA show, just for producing the book and poster. I'll have to back out for now.

I had a discussion with D.M. about the load time on that format too, longer than what I'm used to on the smaller scanner. I will make do with what I have for now, then invest in the equipment when I have proper financing.

Let me know how it works out for you?

GarSeeYa!!!

That's a great price. I don't know anything about the quality of Mustek's products. I bought an Epson Perfection 4870 last fall and it ran over $600. It's considered a good prosumer scanner and does 8.5x11. So if the Mustek 11x17 is under $300 once you get it into Canadian dollars with shipping, I have to wonder about the quality of the scan.

On the other hand, scanning black and white comic pages is not a stretch of a scanner's capabilities. Anyone have experience scanning colour work with one of these?

S

Thank you very much for the helpful advice, Derek.

Yeah, it says that the scanner's optical resolution is " 300 dpi (H) x 600 dpi (V) ". I was under the impression, though, that that was 'good enough', because no printers really exceed that.

Personally, I don't care about "blowing images up" (and I'm sure this scanner is perfectly adequate for "shrinking images down"), I mainly have one question:
if 'somebody' wanted to draw grayscale images on 8.5 x 11 paper, and then print a comic life-size, on 8.5 x 11 paper, would this scanner be able to do that?

If you (or anybody else here) can answer that question, I would greatly appreciate it. I'm a confused fellow.

CogNoman,

The short answer is "yes."
The long answer is "but you won't be smiling while you do it."

Before I begin, I should note that I believe Kandrix and Laurie actually use one of these, so maybe your best bet is to bake some brownies and show up at their door begging for a demo. Nothing beats firsthand experience, and despite what I say below, if you like the Mustek after having tried it yourself, you'll get no grief from me.

So let's go...

You need a scan head that has a higher native resolution than 300dpi the same way you need a car that goes faster than the speed limit or the way you need more ram than the software package recommends. Exceeding the spec gives you wiggle room.

On the surface it looks pretty simple: scan at 300dpi, print at 300dpi, receive the love of millions of fans.

Here's how it actually goes: scan at 300dpi, rotate misaligned scan 1 degree clockwise, watch scanned image dissolve into unprintable mush. No, the "sharpen" filter won't save you. There are myriad other issues, too, but the non-perpendicular page deal is the one you'll encounter for sure.

You could (as I used to) keep pivoting the art on the scan bed and rescan until the page is aligned. Good luck. Better to scan at 1200dpi, rotate to where you like, make patch corrections (more on that below) and scale down to 300dpi for your final image. It sounds convoluted, but works well. Others on this board may have alternate processes. Please consult your neighbor.

What is a patch correction?
The beauty of the digital age is that most paste-up is now virtual. When Frank Miller drew the first Dark Knight, he didn't erase panels. Instead, he pasted a new patch of illo board over the offending panel and redrew it, leaving the rest of the page intact. The joke of it, as reported by d!ck Giordano and Klaus Janson, is that Miller had up to four layers of patches on some of his pages!

A patch correction is simply a redrawn bit of art patched over the existing art. The patch can be a whole panel, or just a tiny bit of a figure such as a single finger on your character or an errant shadow. These minor fixes are usually better done in digital. Remember the days of layering white-out and drawing over an increasingly lumpy surface?

Patching at 1200dpi provides more flexibility than patching at 300dpi whether you are cutting and pasting a patch or simply drawing your edits on a new layer. The resulting patch will be much more seamless, too. It works so well that if you're not careful, you'll find yourself merrily patching away into the wee hours until you realize you've redrawn your whole page. But at least you'll be having fun!

So that is why you need more than 300dpi. You'll appreciate the flexibility and ease of use.

A word on quality.
People rarely mention the quality of the scan head or the quality of the scan software. Both will also have a huge effect on your results. The short test is simply to scan a piece of grey paper (solid grey, not halftoned-- although the halftone scan is also a test worth doing) and see how evenly grey the scan turns out. Chances are it'll be blotchy. Some bits darker (overexposed), some bits lighter (underexposed). There isn't a scanner in the world that can register tones perfectly edge to edge. So maybe the scanner always darkens along this edge and has a light patch near the middle with another light flare toward that edge. Every scanner (even within the same model line) varies. It's good to know how much tonal drift your scanner of choice presents and what you're willing to live with.

Will this uneven scanning affect black and white scans? Yes. Areas that consistently scan darkly will result in your fine feathered lines getting heavier. Areas that scan lightly will result in your fine feathered lines withering or even disappearing. It is not fun when the lines on one part of your page are perfect, but disappear or mush out on another part of your page.

So beyond the 300dpi question, make sure the scan quality is good.

Whew! Too much yap.
Thanks for listening, hope you can make some use of this.

Cheers!
-Derek

Ah, what the heck. This one's for you guys:





Hey, I told you I was tired!

Wow, this was a very informative thread, thank you all.

Unfortunately Im still stuck with my Brother Fax Scanner... LOL

With what you said about scanning in at high resolutions, thats great if you have a computer with the capacity to handle it... Im still running a PII 500, with a limited memory 8gig HD and 288mb RAM, not to mention my vid card is only a 8mb card... but I deal...

BTW, I have two flatbed scanners here, but you need to have Windows 98 to run them, if anyone wants them you can have them... Im running W2K and we all know how cooperative that can be sometimes...
(plustek opticpro.... OLD 11 x 17)

both parallel. I picked them up off of Freecycle.org

Plustek FB IV P
The other is an older Plustek Opticpro 4800P.

Neither works in W2K... for me anyway...