4 ms·
One thing I've noticed is that the bottom of the standalone scanner market completely disappeared. You used to be able to easily find parallel-port flatbed sca
by hakfoo 3y ago
One thing I've noticed is that the bottom of the standalone scanner market completely disappeared.
You used to be able to easily find parallel-port flatbed scanners for $50 or less, and they eventually shifted to USB. I suspect it was often used to "fluff out" a PC bundle-- "Buy a $1200 AMD-K6 machine and get a scanner and terrible inkjet printer free!" They were probably more than ample for the "scan in this document we need a copy of" use cases-- a few hundred DPI.
While I still see there are a handful of sub-$100 scanners on the market, it's hardly the variety you used to find. It's like a "compliance" product-- being sold because they need to to fill some obligation rather than a vital market full of advancement.
Also note that it's a lot less easy to do the "recycle quality vintage hardware" thing for scanners than printers. Many of them are stranded with ancient drivers and often no support past WinXP or 7. (Yes, there's things like VueScan for ongoing support, but paying for that impacts the overall math).
I ended up finding a scanner I sort of liked used that did have drivers (Epson V39, I wanted something USB powered because I don't have room for any more power bricks) but it involved way too much Googling in the electronics aisle of secondhand shops.
I assume that this is because the market has basically assumed anyone not buying commercial-grade stuff will buy an all-in-one reliability nightmare that won't scan without yellow ink. This sort of thing didn't occur in other markets: They sold low-end VCRs and DVD players built into crappy TVs, but they also still sold standalone ones.
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y agoI picked up a colour laser Brother MFC for $100 three years ago, with 600 DPI scanner / copier. Wifi printing from our phones works with no additional setup than having the printer connected to wifi. It needed new drums and toners, and continues to function like new to this day. Not quite $50, but $100 Australian, so not far off.
- akrotkov 3y agoThe lack of a low end scanner market could also be attributed to the fact that everyone these days has a device with a camera that is either good enough or in some cases better for digitizing documents than those old scanners.
- Stevvo 3y agoAre phones really better? A scanner has uniform and perfect lighting every time. On a phone there are often issues with glare or shadows.
- chmod775 3y agoSomeone is going to "solve" that with AI, if they didn't already. Yeah it might randomly decide to swap out a few words, sentences, and numbers, but it looks really good!
- justsomehnguy 3y ago99% of usage is scanning office documents. Sure, with a flatbed you don't need to bother with perspective correction, but 99% of times it's get scanned, mailed and forgotten forever, so nobody bothers.
- joenot443 3y agoThey’re better in the sense that they are in your pocket and take fractions of the time to use. The app iScanner really does work very well. The glare and shadow issues are trivial to solve with good CV these days, the resulting documents are pretty damn close to a hardware scan. I had to fill out a bunch of forms when I transferred my car to the US, and everyone along the way seemed perfectly happy with photo scans.
- ornornor 3y agoA phone won’t match of course but it comes surprisingly close for “scanning” documents and sending them to your insurer or whoever wants them. It’s able to remove noise, crop to the page edges, and deskew the whole image.