On 06/15/2012 09:17 PM, Chris Tofu wrote: I'd think it'd almost always be preferable to get a used, older, but made of metal and built like a tank REAL production scanner on the surplus market than a plastic piece of consumer crap that's designed to break after a few uses. Not at all insulting you for your purchase, but we all know how crappy the consumer stuff is nowadays. I'd return it and put your money into something beefy that'll actually last through those books. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

I have used the Epson Workforce 645 - jammed a lot - I returned it. I now use the Fujitsu Scansnap S1500 to scan BYTE and other magazines. Works great, I love it - about $500 new. --- On Fri, 6/15/12, Chris Tofu <rampaginggreenhulk at yahoo.com> wrote:

--- On Fri, 6/15/12, Chris Tofu <rampaginggreenhulk at yahoo.com> wrote: You're going to drive yourself mad. Having done printer and scanner repair for years, I can say, that your machine will be way more trouble than it's worth. It's NOT intended for scanning huge tomes of paper. It's meant for scanning in a dozen sheets every month or so, not hundreds in one night. Cheap ADF's are of poor quality, frequently feed pages crooked, and wear out quickly. You're going to have a hell of a time stopping and resetting after every time it picks two pages, or jams. Once the rollers wear out, you won't be able to replace them either, since parts won't be available - or you'll have to replace the whole assembly, since the individual roller or sep pad you need is not available. Low quality machines like this are designed for very light duty use. Many people just don't get this. Like when the DMV bought tons of cheap Samsung desktop laser printers for printing on registration forms (smaller than normal paper, loaded in the manual tray). I was replacing manual tray pick assemblies left and right. That front tray was never intended to be used a hundred times a day, every day. And individual components for the printers weren't available either, you had to replace the whole assembly. Yet, we had exactly the same printer in our office, being used for receiving incoming faxes and nothing else. It never once broke - but we only put a thousand prints on it a year. It's a hundred dollar printer. You get what you pay for. Use it for what it was meant for, and it'll be fine. So, basically, if you want to scan more than one or two books, get a real scanner. You won't be able to get it from Wal-Mart. You'll have to spend some actual money on it if you buy new. Spend a few hours researching, you should be able to find a used machine on eBay that'll serve you well for a reasonable cost. It'll still be probably three times what you paid for the copy/scan/fax/print/answering machine/clock/radio/slices/dices/salad shooter thing you bought, but on the other hand, you won't throw it out the window in frustration after you've spent six hours trying to scan a five hundred page manual and it keeps feeding two sheets at a time, so you're sitting there putting pressure on the stack of paper just right so it picks correctly. Or, you could just use your machine until it does break, then return it as defective. And they may have improved the quality of this kind of device in the last few years. I have been out of the "printer service" trenches for four years or so (of course I can still change the swing plate in a 4250 in record time), so perhaps they've managed to figure out how to make a pick assembly in a consumer printer that'll last more than two thousand pages. I don't know. YMMV. Batteries not included. Starter ink only. -Ian