Like many people, I have boxes and boxes of old pictures, many of which are of irreplaceable sentimental value. While it is possible for me to scan them, I have long thought of scanning as being an inordinate, time-consuming pain in the ass. I have an old Umax Windows 98 era scanner which takes a couple of minutes per page, so I just plain HATE scanning, and avoid it like the plague except when it is absolutely necessary.
A friend just told me about a newer scanner that scans pictures and documents at the rate of a whopping 12 pages per minute.
I had no idea. This means that it is now possible for me to scan all of my old photos — in probably less than one day — instead of having the process consume the rest of my life.
The Fujitsu ScanSnap s1300i is not a bad deal for just over $250, and I’m thinking of getting one.
Any ideas one way or another?
Technology evolves more rapidly than my thinking about the technology itself. So, when I say that “I hate scanning” what I am really saying is that I hate the old scanning technology that I have, and unfortunately, my distaste for the process made me just stop ever thinking about it, which is irrational and not in my interest.
Comments
4 responses to “I hate scanning! Right?”
If it’s legal size, I have that same Umax, which languishes in a closet for lack of XP drivers, let alone anything newer than that.
Newer machines are faster, but then they’d pretty much have to be.
I have used a commercial service to scan 1000+ negatives both 35 mil and APS. The logic is they can buy better scanners than I can because the costbis spread over many clients. Anyway I was very pleased with the results and now my photo archives are sitting on a piar of USB hard drives.
I highly recommend you NOT get a scanner that feeds the photos or documents through. One mis-feed or jam and say goodbye to that one-of-a-kind photo of grandma…
Get a flat bed scanner where you place the items in and copy OR just make one that uses you phone camera like so
http://www.intomobile.com/2008/09/03/diy-homemade-iphone-document-scanner/
with good lighting you’ll get great/fast results
I recently had to scan a few hundred photos. I found it much, much faster to fill the flatbed with pics, scan, and chop up the results into separate pictures with an image manipulation program like paint.NET. Faster than scanning individual photos, that is. With paint.NET, you can use a keyboard shortcut to “paste into new image.” With shortcuts for copy and save, you can get into a groove.