scanners

Re: "Along the same line of sharing from AL, can you share with us what Equipment you use to scan books, manuals, and papers in order to archive them on bitsavers?" For anyone looking for a good scanner on a budget ...... The HP 5470C and 5490C are available on E-Bay cheap (sometimes under $10) and these are very high quality high-end scanners that originally sold for $300 to $500 not all that long ago (2002). They were PC Magazine's "Editor's Choice" and they are very hard to beat, even today, for either speed or quality. The 5490 is the model with the automatic document feeder (ADF), the 5470 is without out. But, in fact, the scanners themselves are identical, the document feeder is available separately and is also often sold on E-Bay, it is HP model number C9866A. These are excellent desktop scanners. They have both USB and parallel interfaces, 2400 dpi true hardware resolution, color and black and white (they have multiple sensors for different modes), they are supported by 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP and they are the quality that you would expect from the products that were -- not all that long ago -- HP's "top of the line". The ADF will do a lot more pages than the ratings, about 60 sheets (the specs, I think, say 25 sheets). About the only drawback is that the scan width is limited to just over 8.5". There are two caveats, both related to the ADF: Be sure that you get the input paper tray, and be sure that you get the [proper] power unit. The paper tray can no longer be ordered separately and the ADF won't work without it. The power unit is still available but is very expensive (possibly more than you will pay for the entire scanner and ADF). The 5470 comes with a 12 volt power supply, both the 5490 and the C9866A add-on come with the dual output 12/24 volt supply required when the ADF is installed. The document feeder does not do duplexing, but Adobe Acrobat has the intelligence to scan all of the odd pages, then flip the stack and scan all of the even pages, and properly interleave the resulting document. Also, you can scan such a document in sections, you don't have to do it all at one pass. Acrobat is actually amazingly competent at doing this, and has become one of my most-used programs. Don't even think about getting a scanner -- any scanner -- without an ADF (document feeder). I have scanned over 20,000 pages in the past 3 years, and even for relatively short items, you really need an ADF. Also, when using an ADF, the document length is not limited by the scanner glass, you can scan (in theory) infinitely long pages. [When an ADF is used, the scanner light and imaging sensor are locked in place and do not move, rather it is the paper that moves.]