Thursday, July 05, 2007

Scanners and Scanning - An Update

In this post, I mentioned that I had bought a new scanner and I just noticed a recent post by Sally Jacobs on using a portable scanner whereby she mentioned that I was singing the praises of the Canon LIDE scanner.

I really did like that scanner. It was perfect for my needs. However, I had to return it because when using it on my laptop computer, when I scanned anything larger than a 5x7, a portion of the scanned image was darker than the rest of it. They gave me a replacement, same model, and it did even worse than the first one - two sections of the image were darker than the rest. Staples didn't give me any hassles over returning the scanners and apologized profusely for the problems.

It may not have been the scanner. Could two of them have been malfuntioning? It might have been my laptop, which does not have USB-2 available, only USB. Since the Canon LIDE does not have a separate power supply it draws its power from the USB port in the computer and USB probably does not provide as much power as a USB-2 port. The specifications stated it would work with USB but that it would be much slower though it didn't say anything about the quality of the scans. I didn't install the scanner on my desktop computer, which doesn't have USB-2 either, to see if it would work because I bought the scanner specifically for its portability.

Anyone know of a small, portable, scanner that has an external power supply? In case it matters, the laptop was not running on battery power. And no, although I'd love to, I'm not yet prepared to get a new laptop!

1 comment:

TK said...

Becky, I have a Canon Lide that I've used on many trips with my old Compaq Presario. No USB2 on that laptop either but the Lide worked fine. On a few occasions it did strange things, like scanning only a tiny portion of a photo instead of the whole thing, or cutting off part of an image, but in general it worked, just a little slow due to lack of USB2. Sorry to hear you had trouble with it. Now it occurs to me I should try mine out with my new laptop (Dell with Vista) to see if it will work as well there.

Did you try contacting Canon support to see if the problem you had is a known issue?

I appreciate your bringing up this subject, Becky, because I just checked to see if Canon support has a Contact Us link (they do) and while I was on their site, I realized I had to download the new driver that works with Vista. Hah, I bet that will make my test run go better!

BTW, I'm flattered to have gotten the Thinking Blogger award, and I'm not ignoring it! My response is in draft status about half done (with about a dozen others) and I just need time to... um... Think!