Re: scanners

["L. C. Robinson" <lcr@onewest.net>]

On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, Cheryl Homiak wrote:

> understand that you can get scsi scanners that don't take a
> scsi adapter; they plug into the printer and the printer plugs
> into the parallel port if i understand it correctly.

We did some research here before purchasing ours, and apparently,
these parallel port scanners are problematic: best to steer clear
of them.

> Anyway, I know nothing about scanners so could use somehelp.

Well, there are lots of very cheap scanners out there which have
shoddy drivers and proprietary non-standard interfaces that may
not even work reliably on different M$ platforms.  So you must
check that your proposed scanner purchase is well supported by
the current open source SANE drivers.  See:
http://www.mostang.com/sane/sane-backends.html

We ended up buying an inexpensive Acer USB scanner, which has
been adequate for our needs (but I know little about the other
requirements you mentioned).  Note that Acer has greatly reduced
it's support for it's hardware products, in the wake of the
(non)recession (and they never did support linux, but that's not
unusual).  Anyway, you know how to get support from the internet.

Note that the real cost problem you may have here, may be for
quality OCR text conversion software, as the current open source
solutions are very poor (you talked about scanning books, so I
infer that this is of paramount importance).  There was a
discussion here about this a while back, so you might want to
check the list archives.  I don't have any experience with
commercial OCR solutions for linux, so I can't comment on them.

LCR

-- 
L. C. Robinson
reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@onewest.net.invalid

People buy MicroShaft for compatibility, but get incompatibility and
instability instead.  This is award winning "innovation".  Find
out how MS holds your data hostage with "The *Lens*"; see
"CyberSnare" at http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html