Which scanner should I get?

yogi99

yogi99

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I want to get a scanner for my PC to scan some text from my textbooks. I want a scanner that is as cheap as possible and be able to scan text from textbooks well. The scanner should also be usb 1.1 compatible (the oldest usb?, my PC is old, Pentium 3 733 MHz). Which scanner will fulfull my requirements?

I'm thinking about buying a Canon Lide 30 scanner. Will this scanner produce good scan for text from books? Which scanner would you guys recommend for under $100 that gives good scan? Thanks.
 
[quote name='BigNick']Canon Canoscan Lide 20

The official scanner of big nick

Small, can be used while standing it on its side, only needs usb, no power supply needed!!!

http://www.circuitcity.com/detail.j...ookmark=bookmark_0&oid=57370&catoid=-8030&m=0[/quote]

You seem to have good advice on hardware and accesories, I bought the pci tv tuner you recomended a while ago and its pretty nice, especialy for the price. Just wanted to say thanks.
 
[quote name='SpookyD'][quote name='BigNick']Canon Canoscan Lide 20

The official scanner of big nick

Small, can be used while standing it on its side, only needs usb, no power supply needed!!!

http://www.circuitcity.com/detail.j...ookmark=bookmark_0&oid=57370&catoid=-8030&m=0[/quote]

You seem to have good advice on hardware and accesories, I bought the pci tv tuner you recomended a while ago and its pretty nice, especialy for the price. Just wanted to say thanks.[/quote]

Glad I could help. Make sure you setup an accoutn with titantv.com and that way, you can set record reminders!
 
[quote name='asaraa']I love my LiDE 50. I thought that was around $100 @ Christmas.[/quote]

Ya, Canon makes awesome stuff, very under rated IMO.
 
The Lide 20 is discontinued. The Lide 30 is now Canon's entry level unit. Right now at Best Buy it's $79 plus a $30 rebate. When I bought it they also offered me a $10 two year replace or refund warranty that also gave me triple Reward Zone points for the whole purchase, which means the warranty almost paid for itself.

By sheer coincidene I bought one last week for an OCR experiment in how much work it takes for a out of print book to be converted to digital form for e-book sales on a sub-$1,000 system, printer optional. It's on the noisy side due to its small size but it's great if you have limited space. Another nice feature is that its powered by the USB connection so there is only one cable for the unit.

The Lide 30 has a pretty solid bundle of software but if you're going to have some serious document management tasks I highly recommend Scansoft's Paperport app. This give you a central desktop to join together all your scanning related tasks and connections to all your major apps. Want a set of scanned pages OCRed? Just drag the stack to the Word icon and it's all automatic from there. It also has a nice feature that indexes all the documents in specified locations (can be the whole PC) and makes it easy to track down anything you've written or scanned to OCR.

http://scansoft.com/paperport/
 
[quote name='epobirs']The Lide 20 is discontinued. The Lide 30 is now Canon's entry level unit. Right now at Best Buy it's $79 plus a $30 rebate. When I bought it they also offered me a $10 two year replace or refund warranty that also gave me triple Reward Zone points for the whole purchase, which means the warranty almost paid for itself.

By sheer coincidene I bought one last week for an OCR experiment in how much work it takes for a out of print book to be converted to digital form for e-book sales on a sub-$1,000 system, printer optional. It's on the noisy side due to its small size but it's great if you have limited space. Another nice feature is that its powered by the USB connection so there is only one cable for the unit.

The Lide 30 has a pretty solid bundle of software but if you're going to have some serious document management tasks I highly recommend Scansoft's Paperport app. This give you a central desktop to join together all your scanning related tasks and connections to all your major apps. Want a set of scanned pages OCRed? Just drag the stack to the Word icon and it's all automatic from there. It also has a nice feature that indexes all the documents in specified locations (can be the whole PC) and makes it easy to track down anything you've written or scanned to OCR.

http://scansoft.com/paperport/[/quote]

So how is the quality of the scan of textbooks or books from Canon Lide 30? Is it very good, good, ok, or poor? Can it also scan colors or just black and white? And is Lide 50 much better than Lide 30 to justify the price increase?

Thanks for the help guys.
 
I use mine for everything. I give it 9/10. It scans phots great, text comes out great. i have never tried to OCR. I have found out its the software that makes a difference, not the scanner.
 
[quote name='BigNick'][quote name='SpookyD'][quote name='BigNick']Canon Canoscan Lide 20

The official scanner of big nick

Small, can be used while standing it on its side, only needs usb, no power supply needed!!!

http://www.circuitcity.com/detail.j...ookmark=bookmark_0&oid=57370&catoid=-8030&m=0[/quote]

You seem to have good advice on hardware and accesories, I bought the pci tv tuner you recomended a while ago and its pretty nice, especialy for the price. Just wanted to say thanks.[/quote]

Glad I could help. Make sure you setup an accoutn with titantv.com and that way, you can set record reminders![/quote]

I did but I have a suspicion sometimes it messes up, even so its great. I've actualy watched "Kirby:Right back at ya" now (regretably).
 
[quote name='SpookyD'][quote name='BigNick'][quote name='SpookyD'][quote name='BigNick']Canon Canoscan Lide 20

The official scanner of big nick

Small, can be used while standing it on its side, only needs usb, no power supply needed!!!

http://www.circuitcity.com/detail.j...ookmark=bookmark_0&oid=57370&catoid=-8030&m=0[/quote]

You seem to have good advice on hardware and accesories, I bought the pci tv tuner you recomended a while ago and its pretty nice, especialy for the price. Just wanted to say thanks.[/quote]

Glad I could help. Make sure you setup an accoutn with titantv.com and that way, you can set record reminders![/quote]

I did but I have a suspicion sometimes it messes up, even so its great. I've actualy watched "Kirby:Right back at ya" now (regretably).[/quote]


Ive never had any major problems with it. The worst thing was when I didnt set teh right record format, and a simpsons episode was like 10 gig!
 
Fry's currently has the Canon Lide 30 for $10 lower. I y already bought it at Best Buy and live in Fry's territory you should be able to get price protection if you can dig up a Saturday newspaper with the ad.
 
Haven't tried scanning text with the LiDE 50, but pictures are great.

As compared to the LiDE 30, I can't say. the LiDE is probably all you need. In reality, I saw it was a higher number and not that much more, so I got it (Consumer Reports wpuld cringe!).

take the extra money and go to CC, I hear there is a $4.99 sale sometime soon!
 
You really should research OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software first. Because from what I can tell you it is a pain in the ass. Certain fonts won't be recognized, if the page is tilted slightly it might not work, any pictures or decorations on the page will throw off the software, indentation will fuck it up, etc. Plus, scanning a book is extremely tiring since you have to flip, line-up, mostly likely hold the page in place, and scan each page. Most of the time more than once.

And trust me, I've tried a ton of different software packages.

If you are doing this to take your books with you in a pda or something forget it. You could probably read the book twice before you even have scanned it all.
 
The Canon has OCR from Scansoft included in the software bundle, so you should give that a chance before shelling out more money.

The OCR integrated into Paperport is from the same code base. I've been having fairly good results with it at relatively low resolution. I'll soon be running an experiment to weight the improvement under higher resolution vs. the added time to scan and storage issues.

I've had only a few incidents in which a tilted page made for severe errors to be proofread. In cases where this detected before sending to OCR there is usually options within the software to straighten the alignment of the image without scanning again. In most cases it was simpler just to handle the resulting errors in proofreading than disrupting the process with alignment fiddling or rescanning.

The value of OCR depends on tha application of the text. If you're doing something critiquing a written work it can be a big labor saver for acquiring excerpts for inclusion. If it's a frequently used reference work with no reasonably priced e-book option that is also a reason to OCR the needed portions. In my case it is to create an e-book of an out of print shared universe anthology so that the editor who owns the universe can experiment with e-book publication.

Another thing I'm looking into is industrial scale scanning. My sister has a ongoing project in her business to get rid of many cubic yards of old records and various documents. She got a $2500 Ricoh scanner that has a sheet feeder and full duplex scanner connected to a PC via FireWire. It's amazingly fast if you're used to inexpensive consumer models. By my estimate it should reduce the time to scan in an entire 400 page book (part of the same shared universe series) in well under an hour. The remaining time invested will be proofreading and formatting for different digital formats like PDF and LIT.
 
Which OCR software is good? So Canon Lide 30's OCR text scan performance is acceptable? And will my big 800 pages (2 inches) book fit under the scanner's lid?

epobirs, is Fry's still selling Canon Lide 30 scanner for $10 less than bestbuy? Does Fry's have $30 rebate too? Can I buy it on Fry's website or it is in store only? Thanks for the help.
 
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