| General Category > General Discussion |
| Have consumer-grade scanners gotten any better over the last decade? |
| (1/1) |
| Doom:
Back in the day, we always had to worry about the moire effect and unsightly scans caused by bad scanners. Is this a thing of the past? Is a $200 scanner in 2016 better at scanning than a $200 scanner from 2006? |
| TDIRunner:
--- Quote from: Doom on February 07, 2016, 08:33:58 PM ---Back in the day, we always had to worry about the moire effect and unsightly scans caused by bad scanners. Is this a thing of the past? Is a $200 scanner in 2016 better at scanning than a $200 scanner from 2006? --- End quote --- I'm probably not the best person to answer this, but when I look at websites dedicated to scanning video game artwork, I've noticed that most of those sites have very old scans, and most of the sites have very low DPI scans. It seems that scanning in 300 or 600 DPI these days is pretty much standard, but 5 years ago or more, not so much. So to me it seems like the quality has improved. Not sure whether or not the moire effect has improved or not. |
| wiggy:
The moire pattern showing up isn't a result of a bad scan, quite the opposite. It's part of the original offset press printed packaging, so a high enough resolution scan will pick it up. In fact, the higher the res, the more apparent the pattern is. This is why I've always suggested scanning at the resolution that you plan to print in. There's no reason to scan in 600 dpi or higher if you're going to end up reducing it to 300 dpi. You'll just lose data when scaling like that, whereas working with and printing using a 300 dpi scan ensures that you're not cutting info from the image and leaving it to photoshop to determine what parts of the image are worth saving and which aren't (in case anyone is in the dark here, scaling a digital image down is essentially removing pixels). The only really significant change in scan quality for non-commercial applications in the last 10 years is the loss of twain drivers for photoshop. You're forced to use the crappy software that comes with the scanner, versus the much more comprehensive interface in Photoshop. Luckily CS2 is free, and can be installed alongside CS3-up. Otherwise, the LED tech is pretty much the same, and so are the optics. And the drive gear, well, it's a drive gear lol. Not much else to it. |
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