Let Your Scanner Do the Work

After years of scanning photo prints, old letters, and technical documents, the biggest lesson I have learned is to let the scanner do its work. It can select the color and contrast settings better than manual adjustments, and very often the auto setting is better than setting black/white points manually.

Push the button, set the DPI to 150 and let it work -- that's my advice for beginners.

My scanner is one of the better-quality consumer/home scanners, the Canon Canoscan LIDE 600F from circa 2006. While it may not be as good as "pro-sumer" models like the Epson V500, it does a great job for a $200 unit. It even came with a film scanner attachment for scanning 35 mm film. I like the fact that it doesn't use an external power supply (it runs off the USB cable solely), and thus it is great for portability. It is light, yet still scans a Legal size or A4 paper.

Although occasionally I can tweak the settings to get a better scan than the automatic settings, usually the auto settings are just as good. And the auto settings are rarely worse. The only help it needs is specifying the part of the image I want scanned.


SPEED AND DPI SETTINGS

The 600F scanner is fast on all settings up to 2400 dpi. At anything over 2400, it is much, much slower. However, for photo prints, documents and letter, 2400 is overkill. Using 150 dpi for text creates a detailed image which is sometimes too large for the Web. Scanning photo prints at 600 dpi will capture more detail than the resolution of a quality print -- and be very large (a 4x6 photo @ 600 dpi results in an image of 2400x3600 -- larger than most of today's monitors). 300 dpi is usually enough for 4x6 prints and 150 dpi to get very readable text.

The 600F will scan (optically) up to 9600 dpi. But generally the only time I use more than 2400 dpi is when scanning high quality film. Some of the 35mm film I scan is less detailed than 2400 dpi will show. On the other hand with clear, sharp outdoor photos on a good film like Kodachrome, there is an incredible amount of detail in the negatives, yet is still less than 4800 dpi.

My conclusions:

• Use the scanner automatic color/contrast settings
• Use the smallest DPI setting that will capture the data you need, you'll get faster scans and smaller file sizes