HOME

PRODUCT LABS

TECH SUPPORT

FOR SALE

BUYING GUIDES - Buying a new Scanner

Introduction Buying Guides - Home

Buying a New Scanner? Resolution and scanning quality Just like printers, the resolution of a scanner is given as dots per inch. However, don't let yourself be misled by this figure - many scanners claim to scan at resolutions like 4800dpi or 9600dpi - this is a lie! These scanners likely have an optical resolution (the actual ability of the scanner) of about 600by300 dpi and the figure given is the so-called interpolated figure. Interpolation is a simple method of enlarging pictures, but the results are dubious in quality. My advice is to look at the interpolated value and then ignore it! Only the optical resolution is of interest. An optical resolution of 300 dpi is the lowest you can get, but in fact it is more than enough - even for printing on 1440 dpi printers. This is because printers use many dots together to create a particular colour, while the scanner simply sees every single dot as having it's own particular colour. Of course, it won't hurt you to have a 600dpi scanner, but you're unlikely to gain any real benefits unless you're into enlarging stamps to A1 posters! An important thing though is not to buy the really cheap scanners - those £30-£50 scanners you see in adverts and shop windows simply don't provide for quality scanning - they're slow and give low detail - avoid. Printer port, USB or SCSI? A scanner that connects to your printer port (aka LPT or parallel port) is the cheapest solution - however it is also the slowest and quality is often dubious. Only buy a parallel port scanner if you truly can't afford anything else or if your scanning needs are very modest. If your PC has a USB port (most modern PCs do), then a USB scanner is likely to be the best solution for you. Installation is simple, speed is reasonable and there are a lot of good USB scanners on the market now. You should be aware though that to ensure compatibility you will need to be running Windows 98 (Windows 95 support for USB is fragile, while Windows NT doesn't support it at all). SCSI is the last solution - it's fast and efficient, but demands you either already have a SCSI card, or install one. This pushes up costs considerably, making SCSI only really viable for people with big scanning needs or for users who already have SCSI and use Windows NT (since NT doesn't support USB). I see no reason why a home user should fork out for a SCSI solution.