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justinhale · May 10, 2004, 09:19 AM

what is the best scanner for mac computers?

dampeoples · May 10, 2004, 09:37 AM

Nikon Coolscan, I just read a good review of the Coolscan V ED, about $599 from B&H

Peter · May 10, 2004, 09:38 AM

Canons are good -- cheap and high quality.

brucewayne · May 10, 2004, 10:28 AM

I would agree with the Canon's being excellent. Love the fact that hey get their power through the USB cable. However, I picked up a cheap Epson 1250 so I could scan a whack of slides, and I've been really impressed with the speed and quality.

Severed Hand of Skywalker · May 10, 2004, 11:46 AM

Rumor has it that the canons do not support USB 2.0 on Mac's though.

CambAngst · May 10, 2004, 03:37 PM

I'm getting by pretty well with an Epson, but whatever you do, DO NOT BUY AN HP! Awful drivers that break every time Apple nudges OS X up 0.0.1.

brucewayne · May 10, 2004, 04:59 PM

Ya...I've heard that about HP scanners too.

almaink · May 11, 2004, 02:58 PM

Just replaced my old SCSI Umax with an Epson 4870 Pro. It's fast and uses firewire or USB. Can't get it to work with Image Capture but it works fine with Photoshop and Acrobat and the standalone epson and Silverfast software.

CambAngst · May 12, 2004, 08:27 AM

Do any scanners actually work with Image Capture?

I remember Steve rolling out Image Capture during some keynote a couple of years ago and bragging about how it was going to make all scanners easy to use with Mac OS X. Certainly didn't work out that way.

I guess Apple has figured out what the guy who developed VueScan has been saying for ages. To paraphrase his comment on the plethora of scanners that VueScan does not yet support, "the vendor(s) won't document the commands they use, and these commands are too complex to reverse-engineer."

ratlater · May 12, 2004, 04:51 PM

Originally posted by CambAngst:
Do any scanners actually work with Image Capture?

I remember Steve rolling out Image Capture during some keynote a couple of years ago and bragging about how it was going to make all scanners easy to use with Mac OS X. Certainly didn't work out that way.

I guess Apple has figured out what the guy who developed VueScan has been saying for ages. To paraphrase his comment on the plethora of scanners that VueScan does not yet support, "the vendor(s) won't document the commands they use, and these commands are too complex to reverse-engineer."

I bought an Epson 1250 just so I could use it with Image Capture, and I love it. Slick and fast and nice quality. Image capture is awesome too and I love the ability to share my scanner with other machines on my LAN. It makes it easy to scan a file that I want on my laptop even though the scanner is connected to my tower.

-matt

dennisbolt · May 13, 2004, 09:13 PM

I have the Epson 1600 (or something like that) from 2002/3. It's driver's disc seem to only work in class and the website seems to not have updated drivers....but Image Capture sees it just fine. My complaint is I don't seem to be able to use Photoshop's import command (twain or the epson scan preview software) to scan-which is much faster than using image capture and then Photoshop.

But it is a very fast scanner and Image Capture is very fast with it, so I can cope.

escher · May 13, 2004, 10:53 PM

Are there any good scanners with an automatic sheet feeder that work with Macs? I'm currently looking at a Brother MFC-8840DN multifuntion printer that has a sheet feed scanner (and fax, duplex, PostScript and Ethernet). But I think it's butt-ugly and I would consider a laser printer and separate scanner, if I can find one with automatic sheet feed.

Escher