Scanner

[rosijayne]

Hi there
I would like to get a fairly decent scanner for scanning black and white and coloured photographs on to my laptop.

I would like one that scans front and back of photographs, due to some having writing on the back, and I would also like it to produce clear photos that can be shared with family.

I don't know if there are any that could "clean" up the photos a bit, as these are old, so that would be a bonus!

Many thanks in advance

[Zaphod99]

Although I worked in information technology, I'm not an expert on scanners, but I'm not aware of double-sided scanning, but one thing you should be aware of, is that it is probably rather risky to put treasured family documents through a machine that involves them going through many rollers. I would imagine double-sided scanning is possible, but do be aware.  Another thing I would say is that the resolution even on low end mobile phones is an alternative that you should think about.  I often photograph a document, and use an online optical character recognition scanning service to extract the text. I think you can even do it with Google images on a phone or tablet.

Zaph

[RJ_Paton]

Hi there
I would like to get a fairly decent scanner for scanning black and white and coloured photographs on to my laptop.

I would like one that scans front and back of photographs, due to some having writing on the back, and I would also like it to produce clear photos that can be shared with family.

I don't know if there are any that could "clean" up the photos a bit, as these are old, so that would be a bonus!

Many thanks in advance

Double sided scanners are available but come with a hefty price increase as they are sold primarily as business quality machines. Two makes that spring to mind and that I have used are Brother and Canon although I'm sure the other manufacturers also have similar models.

Any decent scanner will copy photographs/books/letters etc although flatbed scanners (in my opinion) produce better results than hand held units. However if you want the scanner to produce a printed copy you will need an integrated printer and again many current models of will do this.

Cleaning up the photographs is primarily a software process and as far as know there are no current models that do this in unit - the normal process is to save the image to computer and then process the image in a secondary process using the proper software.

[rosijayne]

Thank you, will have a think about all of that.

[RJ_Paton]

You may have to also consider storage for your digitised photos/letters etc. Good quality scans can be quite large and overtime the storage requirements can overwhelm the inbuilt storage in many computers

Factors you may need to ponder over

Budget (affects every other choice)

What exactly do you want to get out of the process

Flat bed or mobile

Resolution: optical resolution and scanner resolution
see https://www.securescan.com/articles/document-scanning/resolution-matters-your-guide-to-scanning-resolution/

Stand alone Scanner or combined printer/scanner/copier

Software

[Alison55]

I have a flatbed scanner that does a great job. You would have to scan both sides separately. It is far superior to the three in one type copier, scanner, etc. It is the Epson perfection V 500. Mine is old, but there are newer models. I use it all the time for old photos and documents. It also scans negatives and slides with excellent results.

[rosijayne]

Thank you Alison, I'll take a look at that one.

[Zaphod99]

The way I've done it for a long time using a standard camera or, my recently bought mobile phone, I finally cracked, is to place the camera or phone on the edge of the table so that the rear camera is just protruding beyond the edge of the table. Place a chair below that with your document on it, paying attention to any shadow either from electric or natural light. Carefully line it up either by moving the phone or the chair or both, and then take a photograph. You can make further very fine adjustments by putting one or more books under your subject, on top of the chair. That way you can line the camera up accurately on the document.


Zaph

[rosijayne]

Thank you that's helpful