Looking for a good scanner

I found some great old baby photos of my wife that I want to scan and archive. Perhaps even have some larger prints made. And of course put them on our website

I'm not really sure what to look for in scanners. I haven't bought one since 2000, and I'm sure the technology has advanced. I'd prefer to not go much more than $200. Obviously quality is going to be the most important thing to me. I'm not extremely concerned with speed, but I do have 100's of photos to scan. Quality > Speed though. USB interface is prefered and I'm not really sure if I need a negative scanner. Or is it a slide scanner? Don't have any slides... but I guess if I can scan negatives, the quality will be better. Good brands?

Thanks for any helpful info, I really appreciate it!

Personally, I've never really found that it mattered all that much these days. They all seem to work about the same, though it is best to stick with a good well known brand for better support of course. Resolution shouldn't really be an issue. Scanners can scan in insanely high resolutions these days, so you'll need a lot of memory if you wanted to use a really high resolution. In truth, what you WANT to do is just be sure you get one that has the same resolution as your printer's max and scan in at that exact resolution if possible. The main reason you might want to use higher is to essentially "zoom" in in analog instead of digital (which means truer to life quality until you zoom in TOO much.)

For none printing purposes, you'd just scan in a resolution good for a monitor (I think the average monitor is somewhere in the area of 96 dpi, I may be mistaken) so you don't have to worry much about it. Printing is the highest you REALLY need.

EDIT: My grandmother has one of those all in one printer/scanner setups, an Epson CX5200. Nice little setup -- she likes how it can make copies without the PC being turned on, and it's also technically easier to replace the ink and all since it uses four seperate cartridges, one for each color, one for black. The scanner in it does more resolution than the printer as usual, but, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a modern scanner that won't go higher than the best printers you can find out there. Plus you'd HAVE to get more memory to use a resolution like that anyway.

I've got an HP all in one (PSC), and I love it. They've got some good printers out there. Also, Lexmark has a good new one (they've got that new digital photo ink that's supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread). You can get one in the $150-300 price range that should do all you want.

I don't need an all-in-one machine. In fact, I'm not going to be printing these on my printer anyways. I'll have them sent out to a lab. As for memory, not an issue. I have more HD space and memory than is needed (I work with very large files on a daily basis). Also, I will be burning the files to a DVD for archival purposes in the safe. I will probably scan them in at the highest resolution possible, do touch ups in photoshop, save one uncompressed copy for archiving and another to post on the web. If I want to have any printed, I'll just send the uncompressed copy to a lab.

I just gotta find a scanner that is good quality. I find it hard to believe that their all the same today. Perhaps on paper yes, but real world results don't always match up to paper.

They aren't "the same" per se, just, at this point, there's not much the companies can do to improve the quality of the scanner hardly. They already go up to such high resolutions that even a gigabyte of memory isn't enough to hold the whole thing without swapping in and out like crazy. So far the highest resolution I've ever seen a printer do is somewhere in the area of 1200x something, but, I've actually heard that inkjets use a little trick or something and are actually, when you get right down to it, still 300x300 dpi... Don't know how true this is, but, even if you're prepairing for a laser printer or something, you really only need so much resolution before it starts to not make a difference anymore, and I haven't seen a scanner that won't offer a resolution high enough to make 2GB of memory or so stutter. You have to bear in mind that if it doesn't fit in memory, it will start to swap a LOT of data back and forth to the harddrive and your system will be so lethargic at doing anything it won't even be funny.

And there's no need to use uncompressed for archives btw. Don't forget that there are lossless compressions. I've been absolutely amazed what PNG can do in fact. Sure it doesn't get it quite as well compressed as JPG (usually apx 2x the size of a high quality JPG) but, it doesn't throw away data to get there either. It's actually good enough for NON archival purposes such as putting on the web typically. No sense in leaving it uncompressed when anyone can use that and it will get your > 100MB images down enough to fit more than two or three on a CD. ^_^

Anyway, since you're really kind of hard pressed to find a scanner lacking in the basics you need, you're more interested in looking at actual service at this point. What extra features do they offer? What warantees and such? Do they have a customer service or something like that? That's why I suggest picking a brand that isn't generic. Get a good well known brand and you should be ok regardless of which one you chose.