Photographer & Web Designer says yes to Visioneer 8920
Written: Jul 12 '02 (Updated Jul 12 '02)
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Pros: Price, speed, quality, 1-touch buttons, OCR, photo negative/slides, fast preview
Cons: short cords, slow scanning of negatives/slides, some trouble with OCR
The Bottom Line: Fast, quiet, OCR/Text, Negative/Slides, and more for under $200? You can't beat this deal! Use the money saved to buy extension cables.
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| adaler1's Full Review: Visioneer OneTouch 8920 Flatbed Scanner |
I made money in college doing a mix of photography and web design. While working for the newspaper as photography editor I used to use top-of-the-line negative and slide scanners. The Visioneer 8920 is by far the best flatbed scanner that I've found that handles both of these. As a web designer and coder the need for a good scanner was a must. I did my research on epinions and other review places and having used my dad's Visioneer scanner I knew they could offer some quality products.
Setup on Windows 2000 was fairly simple. Installed the software and then plugged into the USB. It is VERY IMPORTANT that the software is installed before you plug the scanner in One of the great things you can do with the scanner is setup the shortcut keys. For example, I have the OCR/Text button send to Microsoft Word and picture scan send to Photoshop 6. For buttons not yet configured or the first time you press the button, a dialogue comes up prompting you to which program or application you want to assign to that task. The complete line-up of 1-touch buttons are STOP/CANCEL, CUSTOM (your custom predefined settings i.e. PhotoShop), E-MAIL (sends directly to outlook or other email client), OCR (text sent to Word or Notepad, etc.), FAX (sent to your fax software), COPY/PRINT (black and white), and then the main big green SCAN button.
General Scanning is as simple or as complex as you want it. You can chose to have it auto adjust everything or you can adjust the resolution, sharpen %, brightness, contrast, gamma, saturation, color hue and the scan size. Maybe not important to the average scanner, but to a photographer with an online portfolio or scanning for publications, it is very important. It also has predefined scan sizes (business card, 8x10 photo, 3.5x5 photo, 8.5x11 paper, etc.) taking the guess work out of scanning to the perfect size for printing purposes.
Negative/35mm Slide Scanning is one of the biggest reasons I bought this scanner. For those that don't know, a scanner typically works off of reflected light. The light shines up onto the picture and the scanner picks up the reflection. However, with a transparent object such as a slide or negative this isn't possible. The light has to come through the picture for the scanner to pick it up. This scanner has a small lid lamp that fulfills that need. To scan a slide or negative you place your slide or negative in the appropriate mask, remove the top pressure plate that protects top lamp. (simply pops in and out, my plastic tabs haven't broken yet after MUCH use, very durable), ensure that top lamp's power cord is plugged into the base, and then change the drop down menu in the scan manager to the appropriate scan.
My Experience
The first time I used the negative scan I thought it was awful and messed up. Then I noticed that I was looking at it at like 2600% in PhotoShop. Once I realized I needed to zoom out it looked great! I could see a picture rather than a grain of the film. So special notice needs to be used when choosing your scan size on negative scanning.
When doing large quantities of photo scanning at once I usually scan 4 at a time or more. With the scan manager you can crop around each of the 4 pictures and then it will scan them all at the same time into 4 different files. It helps to speed things up.
When scanning OCR text the scanner sometimes has trouble with large bold headlines and images. I usually have to preview the first few words in the text editor after scanning with a bold headline or special type face. Sometimes things with special tabular formatting rearranges things oddly also. I still use this option a lot for web design. For example when clients want to list letters of reference on their site I just OCR scan the letter and then cut and past the text into my code.
Things I like
Fast lamp warm-up: Takes around 10 seconds at most...I've used MUCH slower
Very quiet
Fast scanning
OCR Text scanning
"1-Touch" scanning: place the picture and push the button
1200x4800 dpi resolution
Things I don't like
Much slower on negative scans: partly due to the necessary resolution
short USB cable: can't place the scanner too far from you computer
One or the other: If the scan manager is open you can't be working on a scan in PhotoShop, you must close the scan manager first and then reload it when finished editing/saving files in PhotoShop
Overall this is a great scanner, I recommend it highly, especially at a price under $150 it's hard to beat.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 114
Interface: USB
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Epinions.com ID:
adaler1
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Member: Dale Russell
Location: Atlanta, GA, USA
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
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