[geeks] Scanner recommendations?

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 10:40:32AM -0500, kevin at pipeline.com wrote:

> On the plus side, it did work well with Linux, the picture quality was
> not bad, and it was rediciously light weight. I put the Canon up on
> eBay and plugged my old SCSI HP ScanJet IIcx and was happy again.  The
> HP was much slower, but it didn't grind my nerves as much. 
> 
> I have since borrowed my mother's Epson Expression 1680 and have been
> very pleased with it.  SCSI, USB and Firewire support (the Firewire
> requires an add-in card), it's very fast and works well with both
> Linux and OSX.  Plus, it has one of the rarest options of all these
> days.... a power button. 
>  
> As far as OCR goes, my thoughts are that it is still not there yet.  I
> scan everything in and save as jpegs in well structured folders (key
> since i cannot search via content).  I use GQview as it appears to me
> to be the fastest of the thumbnail view apps out there for Linux. 

Since you are saving the JPEGs anyway, then it seems that a poor OCR
like you might get from that free Google software[0] would be good enough
to make things searchable.

[0]  What's poor about it is that it doesn't make any attempt to
understand or preserve fancier page formatting, so the text can be
poorly ordered in the output, and your output is plain text.