I have been happily using a Canon MP250 combo unit to scan in documents at work. I usually use it as a WIA device in Photoshop Elements 12, which works fine and produces good scans. The scans I have been getting recently after an interface change are really not as good or detailed as they were. I have tried demo Vuescan which is fine but overkill to buy and Scanspeeder is doing great work while the demo lasts... Any recommendations for a free or low cost option for me please?.
Are you tied to Windows? 'cos I've had great success using my Fujitsu SP-1425 with Simple Scan ("Document Scanner") in Linux. It can drive the ADF and everything. Here's a scan I did of an Interzone magazine, after removing the spine so I could feed it through the ADF (hurts, but I've no room for the piggin' things - so it's slice, scan, recycle!) I use Simple Scan to output PNGs, then a script I wrote to tie together a bunch of tools to compress the PNGs into JPEGs, optimise 'em, pass 'em through Tesseract to add a text layer for full-text search, and output a PDF. Works a treat!
Thanks Gareth, when I saw that you'd replied I thought 'he'll ask about windies...' It's a Win 10 work PC which is tied for a number of other bits of software
