scanner

[Preston Hagar]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 7:30 AM, norman <norman at littletank.org> wrote:
> My scanner is not performing as well as it should and I am thinking of
> replacing it. I would welcome any suggestions, based on experience, that
> any one wishes to make. I use Ubuntu 8.04.1
>
> Thanks
>
> Norman
>

I have a Brother mfc 5440 that I like quite a bit.  It is an "all in
one" that has built in networking, an Auto document feeder for the
scanner, fax capabilities, and cheap widely available ink.  I think I
paid about $40 US for a referbished one.  Here is the manufacturer
page:

http://solutions.brother.com/mfc5440cn_all/en_us/

Mine has support for Linux from Brother.  I actually have it setup
where I can hit 3 keys and it scans a document as a tiff file to a
samba share on my file server at my house.  (It could also do PDFs,
but the tiffs seemed to come out better).  When you scan, you can
choose "file", "image", "text/ocr", or a fourth option I can't seem to
remember right now.  The nice thing is that the Linux software Brother
has for it basically runs a listening daemon for the scanner and then
runs one of four scripts depending on which option you chose.  I have
it scan to a tiff for "file" and put it in a "files" directory and
have it scan to a jpeg for "image" and put it in a "pictures"
directory.  The other nice thing about it is that I was able to get
ink (off-brand) for about $7 (US) to replace all 4 ink cartridges
(black, magenta, cyan, yellow).

The brother daemon is called brscan2:

http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/download_scn.html

Here is the list of printers that it supports

DCP-110C	DCP-115C 	DCP-116C 	DCP-117C 	DCP-120C 	DCP-130C 	DCP-135C
DCP-150C 	DCP-153C 	DCP-155C 	DCP-157C 	DCP-310CN 	DCP-315CN 	DCP-330C
DCP-340CW 	DCP-350C 	DCP-353C 	DCP-357C 	DCP-540CN 	DCP-560CN 	DCP-7010
DCP-7020 	DCP-7025 	DCP-750CW 	DCP-770CW 	DCP-8060 	DCP-8065DN 	DCP-9040CN
DCP-9045CDN 	MFC-210C 	MFC-215C 	MFC-230C 	MFC-235C 	MFC-240C 	MFC-260C
MFC-265C 	MFC-3240C 	MFC-3340CN 	MFC-3360C 	MFC-410CN 	MFC-420CN 	MFC-425CN
MFC-440CN 	MFC-465CN 	MFC-5440CN 	MFC-5460CN 	MFC-5840CN 	MFC-5860CN 	MFC-620CN
MFC-640CW 	MFC-660CN 	MFC-665CW 	MFC-680CN 	MFC-685CW 	MFC-7220 	MFC-7225N
MFC-7420 	MFC-7820N 	MFC-820CW 	MFC-845CW 	MFC-8460N 	MFC-8660DN 	MFC-885CW
MFC-8860DN 	MFC-8870DW 	MFC-9440CN 	MFC-9840CDW


One of the ones in the list can be had (in the US at least) at Staples
for $30 (US):

http://www.staples.com/office/supplies/StaplesProductDisplay?storeId=10001&langId=-1&catalogId=10051&partNumber=734010

Anyway, probably any of the models on that list should be fine.  I
found the brscan software pretty easy to work with.  I haven't used it
to print to from Linux much, but I would expect that it shouldn't be
much trouble.

Hope this helps,

Preston