scanners

scanners

[Cheryl Homiak]

Hi all!
I want to get a scanner and would like some advice.
I don't have USB; I do have either a free pci or ISA slot. If I get an sblive
the free slot will be iSA; otherwise it will be pci. I 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.
Anyway, I know nothing about scanners so could use somehelp. Are there things
that I as a blind person want to look for so that the scanner will actually scan
the pages without me having to guide it or something. I know i'mn probably
revealing major ignorance here, so somebody please give me at least the short
course on this.
Thanks.

Re: scanners

[Rafael Skodlar]

You cannot mix SCSI and parallel ports. There are adapters for one to the
other but that's not the way I would go. Being short on generic or USB
ports for modern USB scanners I suggest you buy one.

USB is becoming a dominant standard for computer to peripheral connections
and you'll be better of going that route. That way you won't need to buy
additional adapters to support your legact scanner when you upgrade the
computer in the future. Some scanners come with cheap SCSI adapter and are
able to work with SCSI and USB so you might want to look into that but 
USB is the way to go.

USB adapter will let you connect other devices that are very common these
days, keyboard, mouse, radio, modems, and who knows what else. I believe
that equipment for visualy imparied will also connect with USB if it's not
already.

I'm surprized your PC doesn't have USB. Are you sure? Maybe you just need
a tiny cable with adapter to connect to a special connector on the
motherboard. If not then you can buy PCI USB adapter otherwise. Try to
avoid ISA bus. ISA bus reached dead end.

PC motherboards are very cheap these days. You can get a good one for less 
than $100. That means it could be cheaper to upgrade your PC with a new 
motherboard than buying different adapters for sound, USB, etc. Most 
motherboards have sound, video, and USB built in.

As far as scanners go that's a different story. What you probably need is 
a device that's able to scan books which is not that easy in some 
cases. Thick heavy books might be a problem with some scanners. There are 
other issues like software, etc. I'm sure but can't think of it right now.

Since I never bought a scanner I can't recommend you one. I see them being
used at work though. Scanners made by HP are a bit more expensive but
their hardware quality and support are most likely worth it. You'll need
somebody to setup the scanner so that you always put the printed material
on it for scanning the same way so that the software won't have hard time
reading it.

Good luck.

-- 
Rafael
      ***  Microsoft is to free computer use       ***
      ***  as Teleban is to the freedom of women.  ***

 On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 10:42:19AM -0600, Cheryl Homiak wrote:
> Hi all!
> I want to get a scanner and would like some advice.
> I don't have USB; I do have either a free pci or ISA slot. If I get an sblive
> the free slot will be iSA; otherwise it will be pci. I 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.
> Anyway, I know nothing about scanners so could use somehelp. Are there things
> that I as a blind person want to look for so that the scanner will actually scan
> the pages without me having to guide it or something. I know i'mn probably
> revealing major ignorance here, so somebody please give me at least the short
> course on this.
> Thanks.
> 
> 
> 

Re: scanners

[Cheryl Homiak]

sorry, there's no way I'm buying a new motherboard right now!!!

Re: scanners

[L. C. Robinson]

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

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