Old Scanner beats Combo

My old HP 5300C Scanjet long bed scanner always had a bit of a haze on the inside of the glass plate, that I swore that I would find a way to clean someday. Then I got a new HP C4200 "all-in-one" print/scan/faxer, and put the old Scanjet away. After a few scanning tries with the C4200, and: waiting at least 4 minutes for it to start to scan, another 4 minutes to render the image, and trying to locate the scanned image, I decided to go back to the old Scanjet and clean it up. The Scanjet takes about 10 seconds to scan, and gives great images once it is cleaned!

I have a lot of old images that need to be digitized, so I wanted to see what the best image dpi tradeoff would be. What I found out from the tests are as follows:

1.There is no noticeable quality difference between (300 dpi) .bmp and (300dpi) .jpg files. They are equally quiet, and both get jaggy at the same magnigfication, so the jpeg compression doesn't seem to add any artifacts and has a whole lot smaller file size.

2. (300dpi) .jpg images really beat (150dpi) images for low noise and high resolution, and average out at about 1 megabyte per file. (which is not a big deal these days)

3. (150dpi) files seem noisy and jaggy with no magnification, and are unsatisfactory for quality archiving.

Well there you have it! Old beats new! Combination products (scan/print/fax) have to cut so many corners to be profitable, that they end up being slower and less efficient than older single purpose products.