Large format scanner (12x17 inch bed) under $700!

[Steve A.]

Large format scanner with 12x17 scan bed under $700:

http://www.plustek.com/product/a320.asp

I just called Kinko's to see if they had a large format scanner there to scan album jackets. Yes, they do but since the album jacket is copyrighted material you would need a signed release for them to copy it. And it would be $5 per square foot... Geez, they are no fun at all!

It sure would be nice to be able to scan an album jacket with a single push of the button! What I've been doing is rotating the jacket and making separate scans that I piece together in Photoshop Elements- what a hassle! Especially having to free up enough RAM to fire up such a memory hog!

Steve Ahola

P.S. Here is a link I found to the only source for that scanner:

http://www.pcmall.com/pcmall/shop/de...no~7304970.asp


P.P.S. Now I just need to go down to the freeway offramp with my "Will Work For Food" sign to scrape up enough money to buy that sucker!

[Enzo]

Wouldn't it be easier or at least cheaper to take photos of them with a digital camera? $700 would get you a pretty reasonable camera with suitable accessories for this, and it could be used for other things as well.

[Dave N.]

Hey Steve,
I'm curious to ask, why scan an album cover? Are you going to do an album cover slide show on your DVD player for MP3's or PC?

Dave

[Brad1]

Why don't you just copy the pic that comes up on CDDB, or go to someplace like Amazon.com, and right-click to save as a JPEG?

http://www.amazon.com/Partridge-Fami.../dp/B000002VGR

Or, do you also need the back? And/or, you have out of print ones? (May be able to find pics of those by searching).

Brad1

[Steve A.]

Enzo:

I do have a digital camera and have used it for low-res pix of album covers. However, the image is always skewed and you usually cannot read the text on the back.

Dave N.:

You may have noticed my threads on ripping vinyl albums. Along with the musical content I do like to archive the record jacket as well. My main concern is preserving content which may become extinct.

Brad1:

I have gotten low-res pix of album art off the internet, usually for records that have been reissued on CD. I am interested in higher resolution pictures, in particular with legible text from the backs. And for many of these albums I have not been able to find anything on-line. Here are a few of the links I have used for album art:

http://www.allcdcovers.com/

http://www.cdcovers.cc/

http://tralfaz-archives.com/coverart/coverartlinks.html

The previous link is very buggy- you can access the content with the following link:

http://tralfaz-archives.com/coverart/

To all:

$700 is kinda rich for my blood (I had bookmarked a similar model a few years back which sold for about $350- I shoulda jumped on that one!)

In any case, I do have a system which works fairly well with my Epson Perfection V100 Photo scanner: I start off with the upper left corner in the "hot" corner, do a preview to establish the automatic settings and then take 4 scans, rotating the jacket 90 degrees clockwise after each scan. The trick here is to do just a single preview, and that will keep the settings the same for all 4 scans, so you should be able to stitch them together better. And it saves time, to boot...

Although I usually scan CD artwork at 600dpi, it's probably better to do the LP scans at 300dpi, to save on time, RAM and disk space- both in the scan process and in post-processing with a graphics program. (I probably should look into Paint Shop Pro- at least in the past it used a lot less memory than Photoshop Elements.)

Here is my own collection of album art:

http://s179.photobucket.com/albums/w299/steeve_a/

Thanks!

Steve Ahola

P.S. I'm still pissed off at Kinko's policy of not copying material which is copyrighted without a signed release. Geez, isn't that what people usually get copied? Articles from magazines or newspapers, pictures from books... Yes, I realize that there is a lot of business material that is copied- but even much of that is copyrighted. Of course, when you use the self-service machines, it is harder for them to enforce that policy...

[Steve A.]

Actually it might not be a bad idea to make up a rig specifically for taking digital photographs of album covers... with a fixed distance I should be able to figure out some settings which produce a decent picture.

Thanks for your suggestions!

Steve Ahola

[Don Moose]

Two suggestions, Mr A -

1 - your camera - can you get it to do any uncompressed formats? TIFF, GIF, RAW?

2 - your software - have you tried the GIMP?
it's FREE, powerful and (theoretically) able to run on modest hardware.

Hope this helps!