What scanner are you using with Win7?

sygnus21 said:

ignatzatsonic said:

What's going on that is causing scanner prices to rise noticeably in the last 2 or 3 years??? Do they also do your laundry? What am I missing?

Photographers with their thousands of negatives and slides needing to be converted to digital files

No doubt true, but it was true 5 or 10 years ago.

Or are you just making a supply/demand argument that prices are just what the traffic will bear--eg, way more people buying scanners?

Perhaps better stated: does the typical scanner of today have major improvements over scanners of 5 years ago? Or is it just that due to demand, the manufacturers can simply charge vastly more for a modestly improved product? Maybe I need to buy Epson stock?

I don't see this effect in processors, ordinary cameras, monitors, and other high tech areas off the top of my head.

I have the HP photosmart C4780. Although I cant vouch for scanning (havent used it yet), the photocopy is brilliant

ignatzatsonic said:

sygnus21 said:

ignatzatsonic said:

What's going on that is causing scanner prices to rise noticeably in the last 2 or 3 years??? Do they also do your laundry? What am I missing?

Photographers with their thousands of negatives and slides needing to be converted to digital files

No doubt true, but it was true 5 or 10 years ago.

Or are you just making a supply/demand argument that prices are just what the traffic will bear--eg, way more people buying scanners?

When you consider the relative young age of digital photography then you realize there are tons of people out there with large libraries of negatives/slides that want them archived in digital format.

This in turn creates a high demand for scanners, especially quality ones. So yeah, you can make a supply/demand argument, though the other part of that equation is the availability of quality scanners.

I'll say this - when I bought my Nikon Coolscan LS4000 film/slide scanner in 2003, I paid $1500 dollars for it. Now a used 5000 (it's replacement) goes for around 2500-3000! A bit ridiculous, but there's your supply in demand for a quality scanner.

On a "side" note..... I get lots of e-mails at home and posts here for this how to guide - Getting your Nikon Coolscan to work on W7 x64 from people happy to be able to use their Nikon scanners under Windows 7 64-bit because Nikon for some odd reason hasn’t bothered to provide a 64-bit driver themselves.

Anyways I'm happy the post provides some relief and they’re not stuck on an old system, or have to get rid of a very expensive piece of equipment.

My two cents.

THe rise in scanner prices may be due to a couple of things...

1) Fairly base level scanners are coming with built in transparency functions which USED to cost an arm and a leg anyway.

2) The demand for scanners is probably LOW. I'm betting that they are selling a lot fewer of them now and that is driving the price up. It's so easy now to just take a digital photo of something and upload that, the need to "scan" documents or pictures or other objects "real time" is probably going down. Also artists (that need their stuff on computer) are more and more now using the computer to do art rather than traditional meda then scan. The "family photo archiver" may be one of the last demographics for the traditional flatbed scanner left...