They're cheap.
Some great reason. It is. When something is simple and cheap and useful, there just is no reason not to have one. So why don'tcha?
Okay, the truth is I don't know how to use one, the new ones are too complicated and expensive and they're just not something I find useful.
That's the lamest excuse since the dog ate my homework.
Useful? There are so many things you can do with a scanner it is hard to believe you can't find one that will fit with what you are doing. You're working on a collage and you have a great piece of stuff which you want to use, but it was found and can't be duplicated. You don't want to cut it up and ruin the whole thing just to get a note card sized bit. Run it through the scanner. Now it won't have the texture of the original, but you're going to add other materials and cover the whole thing with clear varnish, so the texture isn't going to matter. A scanned piece with all of the colors of the original and just the right size leaves the master piece untouched. Maybe you like the pattern but don't care for the colors? Once you've scanned the piece in you can fire up rusty-trusty GIMP or PhotoDelux or even the Big Mother PhotoShop and change what you don't like. Maybe you want a montage of several things, natural and man-made. You can run them through a flatbed and have an image of each to play with till the cows come home. You can play with the images until you find the right pattern and then go use your precious one-of-a-kind goodies.
You may be right the new ones are expensive. Some genius decided that what the average American really needed was a printer which does everything from peeling apples to mixing a good dry martini and they built it all into one box the size of a 1951 Buick. I don't much like things which do a lot of stuff badly, I'd rather have one that does what it does really well.
Okay, so we're not talking about the latest HP, Epson or Cannon multipurpose print/tank/submarine, let's talk about what they replaced.
I got my first scanner way back in 1996, it was a tractor-fed beauty which would do a whole page at a time and it had lots of wonderful software, like my dearly beloved Adobe PhotoDelux 1.0. It also had and picture album maker and something which was called OCR That's optical Character Recognition and it worked about a third of the time. Even for me, and I type with two fingers, it was faster to type in the page that it was to let OCR miss-recognize it. But I've strayed, track-fed was the first type of scanner and they're making something of a comeback, I see them advertised as something to organize your bills. Me, I try to pay the bills and get rid of them but I suppose there are folks who like neat stacks of debt to show off when the IRS comes auditing.
Then came flatbed scanners, the kind that looks like it escaped from a Xerox machine...sorry Xerox, I meant an office-base photo-copier. That's why they call'em flatbeds. They are flat. And they are the most useful of the lot and boy did we snap them up. Back in the day they were a lot more popular than the Ipad. You could slap this month's centerfold down on the bed and presto-chango you had a playmate all of your own, with just a tiny visible crease. Yeah and Polaroids were only used for wedding pictures.
Once the centerfold stage passed, the useful part came out. A flatbed could copy from a book without ripping the page out. Libraries find that very welcome. Flatbeds can copy newspaper articles and send them by email to your cousin in Bugtussel. Flatbeds were all the rage for almost ten years which in computer time is like an Ice Age.
Then came the All-In-One. And the flatbed went like the dinosaur, leaving their discarded carcases littering the digital plain.
No, I'm not going to talk about All-In-Ones, if you have one the instructions for a the flatbed portion of the harangue will do and if you don't then you can avoid buying one and still get great pictures.
Thanks to the All-In there are plenty of fossil flatbeds lying around and they, like most computer parts aren't worth anything, but they still work. Here's where you come in, you can get one for less than twenty bucks. No I didn't miss-type. Twenty bucks, that's four lattes.
There's a beautiful Epson Perfection 1250 at Goodwill on Broadway right now. It scans at 1200 x 2400 which will let you copy Abe's face from a penny to the size of a billboard. Less than twenty bucks folks.
But I don't know how to get it running without the factory software. A lot of the time, the original software is packed along with the scanner when it is donated to the charity. If not you can go to the vendor's site and download it for free. Or...if you've done what I asked you can just use Faststone Image Viewer to run the pumpkin and not bother with all that downloading do-wah.
Yeppers, Faststone Image Viewer which I asked you to download last March has a nifty scanner interface which will run most of the flatbeds as well or better than the original software. I have an Epson Perfection 1650 which never did like the factory software. Faststone bypasses the clunky Epson drivers and runs it off of the Faststone engine and I get wonderful images. I even tried to copy a slide without the slide-scanning equipment and got a useable image, but that's a lesson for another day.
Getting a flatbed running really is simple even without the original software.
How to use one? Put the image to be copied on the flatbed and close the lid and click scan on your scanner interface and you're in business. You aren't really going to claim that you don't know how to use a Xerox? That's a photocopier, sorry Xerox.
So scanners can be used for all sorts of things, they aren't expensive and they are easy to use. And best of all when you have an original less than fifteen inches by nine inches you can convert it to a digital file and use it for all sorts of things. Like all of those wonderful images from the 30 Parks by 30 artists show. A digital file and a bit of effort and there's a Christmas/Thanksgiving/Guy Fawkes day card. How many people do you know sending out Guy Fawkes Day cards?
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