[comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware] Page Scanners

martin@jennifer.verfahrenstechnik.rus.uni-stuttgart.de (Martin Hepperle (PACP)) (06/04/91)

Hi,

I am planning to purchase a page scanner. 
To me the EPSON GT-4000 and GT-6000 color scanners are
looking interesting. I would like to get any comments
on these (or other recommendations). I don't really
need the color scanning capabilities, but the EPSON's
are fairly priced. Is the difference between 400dpi    
and 600 dpi worth the difference in price (~$200.-) ?
Are these devices good enough to scan color photographs
or is the color option just another bell (or whistle)
which looks good in advertisments, but is unusable
in real life ?

Ciao, Martin.

ries@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM (Marc Ries) (06/05/91)

  FYI
  In today's Business Section, there was an article that said HP has
  reduced the price of it's Scan Jet Scanner by 50%.

  Since current street price is not about $1430 including PC interface,
  that should move the price down closer to $800 or less.

evas@cs.eur.nl (Eelco van Asperen) (06/10/91)

martin@jennifer.verfahrenstechnik.rus.uni-stuttgart.de (Martin Hepperle (PACP)) writes:
>I am planning to purchase a page scanner. 
>To me the EPSON GT-4000 and GT-6000 color scanners are
>looking interesting. I would like to get any comments
>on these (or other recommendations). I don't really
>need the color scanning capabilities, but the EPSON's
>are fairly priced. Is the difference between 400dpi    
>and 600 dpi worth the difference in price (~$200.-) ?
>Are these devices good enough to scan color photographs
>or is the color option just another bell (or whistle)
>which looks good in advertisments, but is unusable
>in real life ?

We have a GT-6000 here and it works fine, including the color mode.
Just be aware that the software Epson sells with this scanner
sucks, at least the MS-DOS stuff. We bought the optional SCSI
interface and have it attached to a Sun SparcStation IPC for which
we wrote our own driver and scanning software. The color scanning
works really well; the only problem is that you have to find the
right parameters for each picture but you have to that for BW /
grayscale pictures too. If you want to attach the scanner to 
a PC, you'll probably have to buy the Epson bi-directional 
parallel IO card since most PC parallel interfaces are not bi-
directional. Forget about the serial interface: it's too slow
for any serious use.
-- 
Eelco van Asperen.          || Erasmus University Rotterdam
uucp: evas@cs.eur.nl        || Department of Computer Science, room H5-1 
no claims - no disclaimers  || PObox 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands