Scanners: The Lost Stepchild of the Digital Darkroom

I've been a serious user of my flatbed scanner since I acquired it a few years back. Whether digitizing an old photo, taking a figure out a textbook for a presentation, or just a simple copy from an original that I didn't want to risk getting lost, a scanner offers a lot of bang for the buck in my opinion. While I've had my scanner for several years and it worked, I had no reason to upgrade it.

Now that I've made the switch to laser printing, and been very pleased, it came time to upgrade the scanner. I started to look around, and quickly realized that scanners have gone the way of PDA's- they've been replaced. While PDA's are quickly being phased out by smartphones, the scanners are falling victims to the all-in-one devices. With desktop real estate at a premium, who wouldn't want box that could both scan, print, copy, and even in some cases fax, and read memory cards directly to print? Once again, I'm clearly bucking the market trend, but I still really wanted a more traditional scanning device.

I decided on a budget of around 100 bucks, as that is what I had spent on my first scanner if for no other reason. After some quick research, I quickly figured out that at the entry level of the consumer market for flatbed scanners, I kept seeing the same manufacturers: Canon, Epson and HP. I think these are the only three left, and they have slowly updated their models from years ago with incremental tweaks, but nothing revolutionary. After a few forum searches, it became clear that most regarded the gear from Canon and Epson as better than HP's stuff. Also, there were very few reviews of the current models (although plenty of sites claiming a review that Google found that were merely paraphrasings of the original press release- very weak IMHO). that indicates that they are not exactly aggressively marketing the gear.

I decided to take the "boots on the ground" approach, and take a trip to the local stores. On my way to the scanners, I noticed that there was no shortage of all in one's that sold for seventy bucks and below. I realized that this is another example of the "razor and blades" phenomenon. By getting us to take home a do it all box, we get attached to it as our scanner, and keep buying the cartridges for the printer part. (Maybe they have it print a confirmation page after each scan to shore up the profits? Just a guess!) At any rate, years ago the all in one scanners were not quite on par with the dedicated gear, but apparently they've made a lot of progress over the last few years. Whether they have or not, I won't find out because I persevered towards the flatbed scanners. The one feature that the dedicated flatbeds have the all-in-ones beat on is that they can scan slides and negatives- hence the digital darkroom part.

When I got there, they had both the Canon 4400F, and the Epson V100. Both sell for a target price of $100 so they are clearly competitors. My Epson digital camera has gone the distance, so I gave the Epson the "home team advantage" and looked at it first. I'm still wondering where they went to design school. The lid opens from left to right, which is different than most scanners. In addition, the USB and power cords come out of the right side. at least for my setup, this would produce an extra serving of spaghetti as far as cable management goes. Finally, the decision was made that the entire scanner was falling apart. Perhaps the last customer had dropped it, but it didn't scream durability to this purchaser.

Next, I looked at the Canon 4400F. At least the unit was in one piece. I really wished that I could see the scanner in action, but they weren't hooked up to anything. At least the Canon's lid opened towards the back, and the wires came out the back as well. This model also claims to handle slides and negatives as well, so it meets my target needs. It has Vista drivers available on their website, so I figure that it should be supported for a while so it doesn't end up in the trash heap prematurely. It also has plenty of dedicated front mounted buttons to streamline the workflow.

Based on the lack of competition, it was easy to choose the Canon. After the store was out of stock on it (I think I know why!), I decided to order it from an online retailer. Needless to say, it was cheaper than the store had it anyway. Stay tuned, as I'll have a review up after I run it through its paces and see if it passes muster, or not.

--Jonas