Friday, June 22, 2007

Scanners and Scanning

My portable scanner went phooey on me Wednesday and decided to quit working. Guess it thought it should be able to retire too! So, I spent yesterday afternoon shopping for a scanner. I had received a 'Best Buy' gift card from some of the folks at work so went to the Fort Wayne North store first. Well, it turns out they have stopped selling 'stand-alone' scanners. All they have is the 3-in-1 kind (printer, fax, scanner combo). Not what I want. I want something small enough to easily take off-site, like to my Mom's or on research trips. The techie said the Jefferson Point store might have them though. Nope.

Went across the highway to Staples. They had three models in the store - small, medium, and large. The small one was just what I wanted. It's a "Canon LIDE 70" model and scans up to 8.5" x 11.7" originals. What's nice is that it doesn't need an external power source and it is small enough (1.5" thick, 10.25" wide, 11.75" long) to take on research trips...

I Spent about 4 hours this afternoon scanning letters and it seems to be working quite well. In fact, I think I like it better than the big HP model I have that cost a "lot" more than this new little puppy. The HP can do legal size documents, which does come in handy sometimes, but it's not exactly what I'd call portable.

When you scan documents and pictures do you attempt to "correct" them (contrast, color, etc.) as you scan them? Or, do you simply scan at the defaults and make any corrections later?

4 comments:

Miriam Robbins said...

I correct as I go. As a procrastinator, I know I'll never go back and finish them!

Now that you have a new scanner, maybe you'll want to join me for Scanfest!

Becky Wiseman said...

Sorry, Miriam, I couldn't make it to Scanfest today. Maybe next time. I know what you mean about procrastinating. I've got a lot of pictures I've scanned that still have the default name (scan0001, scan0002, etc.) which is a bit embarrassing - but they are on my "to do" list... someday.

Anonymous said...

Becky, I love love love my Canon LIDE. A good portable scanner is the perfect tool to bring with you to a family reunion. I have a post about this in my draft folder, and this is just the inspirado I needed to dust it off and get it out into the light of day. Thanks, Becky!

Everybody: Are you saving a digital master before you make any changes? Best archival practice is to keep an uncompressed and "unmolested" original, and to make alterations to a copy only.

-Sally J.
The Practical Archivist

Becky Wiseman said...

Sally, I'm looking forward to your post on scanning. I can use all the help I can get in that arena! And yes, I "try" to follow your tip on keeping an "unmolested" original but sometimes inadvertently click on "save" instead of the "save as" button!