So, I get a lot of junk faxes, and I sue a lot of junk faxers. I’ve been planning to get organized, and one of the things I need is scans of all the faxes.
Well, I got an HP scanner with a sheet feeder, and scanned in a bunch of faxes. Then I got some new faxes, so I figured I’d just scan those in. Only the HP scanner broke after a couple hundred pages.
So I got a new scanner.
Now that I’ve compared them, I am shocked at how annoying the HP was. Here’s a few examples:
1. Settings made to a “task”, such as “scan document”, tended to get lost.
2. Some settings couldn’t be saved. For instance, every time I wanted to scan images, the save window wanted to save as PDF. I had to re-select TIFF format every time.
3. File naming was just plain dumb. If you had a multiple-document scan, with files named “x.tiff”, you would get “x.tiff”, “x01.tiff”, “x02.tiff”, and so on. You couldn’t have a consistent numbering pattern.
4. Proprietary format means you can’t just use something else, like VueScan.
5. Pretty cheap construction; I don’t expect a sheet feeder to break in the first 1500 scans or so, even if it was sitting idle for a bit over a year in there.
My new scanner is an Epson “4490 Office”. Which is to say, a 4490 Photo plus the document feeder attachment.
It works nicely. VueScan recognizes it and controls it without hassle. The provided software is competent and not insulting. I set it for 200dpi grayscale TIFF files, and 200dpi grayscale TIFF files is what I get. The name provided to the save gets a three-digit number appended, STARTING with 001, so all the names are in sequence and sort alphabetically, for anything under a thousand pages in a single run.
The visual quality is noticably better. I’m happy, and soon some junk faxers won’t be.
(Ironically, guess whose faxes I noticed in with all my other pump-and-dump stock scams: SOYO!)
Comments [archived]
From: jonas
Date: 2007-02-09 05:40:43 -0600
Wouldn’t it be easier if you bought a fax modem instead?
That way, you could recieve the junk faxes on your computer, wasting disk space instead of ink; and you wouldn’t have to scan them.