Community Newsletter: Q&A forum: What is the fastest and best method to scan photos into a computer?

I've scanned thousands of mostly historical images using 4 different HP scanners with mostly good to great results, in spite of the awful HP Director software that may or may not work on any day. But that's a different story.

I have also used my camera to copy a few old diaries that were to fragile to press down on the scanner, with excellent results. With my 12MP Canon EOS 5D, the results are every bit as good as with a scanner when the pictures or pages are flat, and very good even when the pages are not. And this approach is MUCH faster than using a flatbed.

However, I recently discovered that for some images, the camera is actually much better than the scanner. I wanted a good picture of an old and very faded 1920s book cover. I tried three or four different scans plus some heavy Photoshop work, and was not happy with the results. Then I took a RAW image with my camera. The ability to adjust color is so much better with a RAW image than with a JPG that I got great results this way, with no loss of resolution at all.

So if you have an old faded color or B&W image to scan, a RAW image taken with a camera may give you significantly better results than any scan with a scanner. I'm amazed that I have never read this anywhere as a tip.

For years I have been scanning my wife's watercolor (WC) paintings and it was always a bit of trouble stitching the scans together to make a whole image. My scanner can only take 8.5" X 11" and all of the WCs are larger. Some took two scans while others took 4 scans. Recently I have been taking pictures of new paintings with my camera. It's a modest digital (Olympus C-740) camera with 3.2 MP and a 10X optical zoom. I use a tripod, find a place outdoors or in my garage with uniform lighting (usually a shady spot) and locate the camera about 10' from the painting and zoom in to have the painting completely fill the LCD display. Using the tripod to adjust the height and zoom minimizes distortions. It's cheap and simple to use. I have been wanting a 2 bulb goose neck light fixture for indoor work but maybe in the winter when it's too cold outdoors.

Where can I buy the Canon Li90 flat-bed scanner. I haven't been able to find it anywhere?

Thanks, Larry

The actual model # is LiDE90 & Newegg.com has stock

Better off bying a good scanner.

If resolution is not a main issue to you, use a digital camera to take the photo of those photos or documents you want to scan to PC and upload those photos to PC by using a card reader.

Check out Shutterfly.com and on line photo lab....they are affiliated with a company that does scanning of slides, negatives, all at reasonable prices....especially if you have lot and lots of old slides you want digititzed.

I have not yet used that service but soon will be giving them a try.

William

I have discovered the Fujitsu ScanSnap- around $400...
It feeds 22 pages per minute, single or double sided, black and white or color, and can either load it into the iphoto app or anywhere else in your hard drive- to an email or a file...
Anyway, the feed is vertical, so you can actually "feed" them in stacks...
Fantastic!!
Good luck-
Valerie Houghton
Former PC user, converted to Mac's

I recently had to scan a handwritten book manuscript almost 100 years old, small, crabbed, faded ink. Instead I photographed each page using a high quality digital camera. The process was fast and yielded results at least as good as those obtained by my scanner.

I have an epson photo 2480 with a picture scanner lid that I love and is likely a perfect match for what you'd like to do....

Throw on 15 4x6 pictures and in 5 minutes they're stored with excellent quality. It can also do negatives, slides and larger photos via the regular lid.

It has software that lets you crop on-the-fly, restore color, correct exposure/contrast, etc... and allows you to set "home" (automatic batch) or "professional" mode (slower but allows more control).

We were able to scan, correct and create DVDs with over 3,000 photos in about 3 weeks... Most of that time, the scanning happening in the background while we went through albums, arranged the pictures to music, and created the DVD slideshows.

I've since made a few dvds for friends with a few hundred pictures in a single afternoon...

I paid $199 for it 3 years ago, but have not seen a replacement model (if you cannot find one locally, try ebay?)

Hi
Scanners and their speed, ease of use and quality vary quite dramatically.
However I have been doing what you describe for a few years now and I tried countless 'systems' looking for the perfect one.

I ended up using the Kodak i30 scanner (I think there is a new model now) and it had the best speed, quality, reliability, imaging technology, no jamming, accept any paper thickness for the price compared to all the others.

I used a scanning program called Scan Station written by a company called Versis. (You can get a free trial of Scan Station from www.crispdocuments.com)
Scan Station was by far the best image quality, easiest to use, most versatile, fastest software I found.

Simply pile in ALL your photos at once into the scanner and scan at 300dpi and you will get great quality, true colour, perfectly straight and cropped (i.e. no black borders) images in any format you wish (such as jpeg, PDF, vPDF (vPDF is a super compressed PDF but with no image loss), tiff...) with just one mouse click.

The Scan Station software is the easiest scanning software I have ever tried or used and I have tried MANY!!.
NO technical questions or knowledge is required. Just click one of the scan buttons and it just works and it will scan whatever is in the scanner's feeder to your predefined folder locations in either single files or a multi-page file.

You can have as many scan buttons as you need (i.e. buttons = scanning profiles with unique settings for: dpi, folder location, format etc.).
e.g. you can set up a different scan button for: photos, for personal documents, for mail, magazines/newspapers cuttings, for business documents, etc. etc.)

Scan Station and the i30 (or its equivalent) is a very fast and simple yet powerful combination and I have had no trouble from it at all.

TOP TIP:
Versis Scan Station software was initially designed for business use BUT if you ask Versis or Crisp Documents for the Home use version you will get the software a LOT cheaper.

I hope this helps.
All the best.

Stuart

Our Xerox machine at work scans via sheet feeder, probably 100 sheets at a time, at 10 pages per second in B&W or color and emails you the the scans in pdf or jpg. Because of this I would suggest someone with a lot to scan go to a place with a machine like this.

I faced (and still face) this problem. The fastest way I have so far found is to use a slide scanner and scan in the negatives. I bought mine several years ago on eBay. I can fit strips of negatives in the holder and scan one after another. It's not *quick* but faster than scanning photos and the quality of the scanned image is very high indeed.

Our new Epson flatbed scanner also has this facility but is somewhat more fiddly. The quality of these scans are also very high. Make sure that the *optical* resolution of the scanner is as high as possible. Interpolated points add no information but give impressive sounding numbers on the outside of the box for the unwary.

My wife is an artist and we often need to have extremely high quality scans. For more normal use a modern high quality flatbed should scan your photos to a quality little lower than negative scans.

I suspect that you are hoping there's a cheap automated way of doing this. If you find one, please let me know, as I still have n photos to scan (where n tends to infinity)!

Having done mass photo manipulation in the past I found that I was reverting to my digital camera more and more, set properly this works wonders as you can get it to the point that you have the camera on a tripod and just use a light box (ordinary cardboard box lined with silver foil will do) Other than that an A2 or3 scanner so that you can load the surface with pictures and then separate them in the programme that you are using. scan in at 500 then reset resolution to 300 don't forget to separate your befores and afters if you are altering them in any way. If you are just sorting them for a disc then you still need to set up a safe filing system so that you cannot delete without meaning too.

If you just want to archive your photos, try putting as many on the scanner glass as will fit and save large pages. If you want to edit the photos, you will of course, lose some of the quality by scanning, then copying and pasting into your PhotoShop, or whatever photo program you use.