[Techtalk] getting quality photo scans

[Akkana Peck]

Carla Schroder writes:
> That's interesting, because even when I run a scan at the highest resolution, 
> which is supposedly 1200x2400, it takes longer and it produces a much larger 
> file. But to my eye it looks exactly the same as lower-res images. I think I 

Is that the highest optical resolution, or the highest interpolated
resolution? Some scanners offer fake resolutions that are a lot
higher than their sensors can scan. If the interpolation software
isn't that good, you might do better scanning at low resolution
then scaling it up in gimp or imagemagick.

But I doubt that's the real cause of the sharpness problem
you're seeing -- any modern scanner should have plenty of optical
resolution (300dpi is usually plenty) to give a nice sharp scan
of any normal sized photo.  So there's probably something else wrong.

Do you know if the scanner is capable of making decent images at
all (e.g. with a windows or mac driver)? I know I always hear that
multifunction devices don't scan very well, but I'm not clear whether
that's all a Linux problem or if they just aren't very good scanners.

-- 
    ...Akkana
    "Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional": http://gimpbook.com