I have a low end flat bed scanner , Mustak 600 II ep plus, and I am not getting very good image quality with it.

I scan many images for a web pages from client supplied photos and although the photos are not always of the best quality, they are clear and sharp. But when I scan them they are very poor scans.

I have tried every adjustment from "brightnes/contrast" to hue adjustments and I get no good results.

Is there some trick to scanning with a flat bed of this type or am I stuck with bad scanning from this type of machine.

Julio

-- Julio Navarro (jnamiyo@jnadesign.com), November 04, 1998

Answers

Well..the first thing is to be sure at what dpi u are scanning at. My brother spent $400 on the new HP scanner and said it had poor quality. Once I helped him change the dpi higher..the scans looked great! It should be in ur dsettings somewhere..the default setting is always the lowest dpi. If u have it..try 300-400 dpi..but the higher dpi used..the longer the scanning process. If u have done this and still getting bad scans..and the enhancing software did not help..then it may be ur scanner. Good luck!

-- Mike Valley (cpanthers@email.com), November 04, 1998.

Julio- It would help if you could characterize your scans a bit more: Are they fuzzy and blocky, or is the color just flat? If the former, you may be scanning at too low a resolution. If the latter, it may just take more tweaking, or better imaging software, or the scanner itself may just not be capable of producing good scans. :-(

The trick with most scanners is to be able to set the darkest point of the picture to a pure black, and the brightest point to pure white. The problem with most low-end software is it doesn't give you the tools to really do this very well. Photoshop's "levels" control is a great way to do this, but Photoshop costs about 5x as much as you probably paid for the scanner itself! What you need to be able to do is to set the red, green, and blue controls separately, so that each "color channel" just spans the range of brightness fully. That is, the smallest number in the red channel anywhere in the picture should get translated to "0", and the highest number anywhere should get translated to "255." There's a longer discussion of this, albeit built around the controls on the HP PhotoSmart software, in our "Digital Darkroom" article, at http://www.imaging-resource.com/ARTS/DDARK/ DDARK.HTM

Hope this helps, good luck!

-- Dave Etchells (hotnews@imaging-resource.com), November 05, 1998.

subject:Which scanner to choose?

I have to options to choose and ican't decide which one to choose.. 1st is 640 dpi Acer..(New) 2nd is 600 dpi Mustak(used;half the price of Acer)

I need scans for web developement and publishing documents.

Please help me decide.

-- Shamyl (shamylkv@hotmail.com), January 01, 2002.