flatbed scanner advice please...

[omegaRED]

Originally posted by MK
Aber die Geschmäcker sind verschieden ...

MK

Genau ...

[EchoWars]

The lowest model that HP has to work with W2K is the 4300CSE. The 3400, while it may be possible to get working with W2K (had about 50% success rate in W2K), it is not worth the hassle. HP, as a company, is going to hell in a handbasket, and their scanner software programmers are leading the way

[Nuno]

About scanners, I´ve got the Epson 640u and I´m not to thrilled about it. The scanning quality is very very good, but the speed is not that good IMHO. Previewing is amazingly fast, but once you start scanning something higher than 150 dpi or true color on a whole A4 page it´s not that fast. Epson software *IS* a joke. The OCR stuff seems preety accurate but it´s useless because it crashes like 75% of the time (at least on win2k). I´ve seen it at least with two different systems.

Plustek scanners have fair image quality, reasonable speed, but they are unreliable.

[omegaRED]

OCR ... Try ABBYY FineReader ... Its the best around or so i`ve been told.I never used other OCR programs except the one bundled with the scanner, but that one ofcourse is pretty crappy and i couldnt get it to recognize Cyrilic fonts ...
That being said, ABBYY just doesnt work anymore ... Just starts, shows the splash screen and exits. Must be something i installed afterwards. And i really needed to scan some 5-6 pages of text ... oh well, i guess i`ll have to type it then ...

[MK]

Nuno - I second that. I have not only been working on different HP models, but also on Musteks, UMAXs (the software I got with their scanner was an impudence !), AGFAs etc. and I always found some bugs (or features ? ).

Concerning the price / performance / quality ratio Plustek is definately unbeatable. Additionnally I didn`t had any trouble with them so far, the drivers are excellent, the support too and the quality and speed satisfies me completely. And I love the usability of the scan interface.

If you have a look on their german homepage, they offer Win2K drivers even for some of their discontinued models and for all the other models, even when they are 3 or 4 years old.

Just my 0.02c

MK

[Wulfman]

to close the thread....

got the UMAX Astra 4000U, had an interesting afternoon until it was running.

If somebody else faces the problem: ignore the install cd, head directly to their .com domain and grab the latest ENGLISH drivers... (24megs) - anything else crashs as soon as a real full quality scan starts (prescan was fine, but the rest...)....

got it working and I have to say I am really happy & impressed now.

greets & thx to everybody

wulfman