Need recommendation for a good scanner

Hi,
I need recommendation to buy a good scanner. I bought a HP scanjet 3970 scanner recently after reading some "five-star" reviews, but I am very disappointed with its photo scanning quality for both 1200dpi and 2400dpi - it took more 20min. and did not give any better result. Does any one has used this scanner (or only I got a bad one), please share your experience, or should I change to other brand scanner ? Thank you.

Don

Why are you scanning at those high resolutions? 300 dpi is plenty even for press quality (at 100% scale).
I think it's a good scanner for its price, but don't expect miracles from it: it's not a professional scanner, so speed and image quality are not its strongs...

Agree. 300 dpi is plenty for your needs, assuming of course. If you really wanted some detailed photo editing or zoom features 600 dpi would be fine. Anything above that, you would not be able to tell the difference, short of zooming in to find a ingrown hair on a chin. If you really cared to scan at the highest range, don't expect for it to go through in a flash. It takes a while to scan in at the high resolution. In short, I would not go get another scanner. Hope this helps.

What if the speed is limited by the USB connection rather than the scanner? If you scan an A4 (8" x 11") at 2400 dpi, this is the number of pixels to be transferred from the scanner to the computer: 2400 x 2400 x 8 x 11 = 506880000. And because the color depth is 48 bit/pixel, the number of bits would be: 24330240000 = 23203.125 Mb. Considering the USB's transfer rate of 12 Mb/s, the transfer would be completed in 1933 seconds, so in approximately 32 minutes...

Lorand & Ace1627,

Thank you for the helpful comments. I might be misled by the dealer: the default setting was 200dpi and I was not happy with the result, so I called the dealer and he said you should use 2400dpi because this scanner is 2400 dpi ... (nonsense). I still doubt about the scanner I got (from the way it was packed and the ordering process), but that's another story.
I have one more question: the scanned photos look really too bad compared with digital photos (pictures taken wuth a digital camera), should it be that way or they shouldn't be much different ?

Thanks again.

Don

There's a huge difference between professional and non-professional scanners. Usually professional scanners' price are above 30.000$.

Just take a look on the following comparaison (the same painting was scanned on different scanners with the same resolution, default settings and without any image processing):



The left picture was scanned with a Umax (above 1000$), the right one with a Canon (below 100$) and the center one with a professional scanner (I forgot the model name, but its price is approx. 100.000$).

P.S. Needless to say, the center image is EXACTLY how the original painting looks like...

A picture taken with a digital camera is usually better than a scanned photo because 1. there's no intermediate media, 2. the digital camera has a built-in image processing software (automatic white balance, contrast enhancement, etc.), 3. the focus is perfect, while in the scanner the gap between the sensors and the photo will alter the sharpness.
But if you use a very good scanner and an image processing software, the scanned photo would look much better than a digital photo (of course, that depends on the quality of that photo).

Lorand,
Thanks for the information and interesting example. HP sent me a replacement which gives better photo scanning result. But I'm still not very happy with the images taking from negatives, any suggestion for a negative scanner. Thanks again.

I once worked with this scanner: http://www.bizrate.com/marketplace/product_info/details__cat_id--422,prod_id--11491065.html and the results were quite good, despite the fact that it's not an expensive scanner.
The scanner is quite fast at resolutions up to 300 dpi. I didn't test it with negatives, but diapositives scans pretty good.