Can anyone recommend a fairly cheap scanner? Would prefer AFD for scanning to be fair - I'd love to be able to scan as quick as the photocopiers at work if I have to use a flatbed (so none of this slow scanning down the page that flatbeds normally do) To be fair, I was thinking of getting a cheap printer with scanner functionality (looks like I actually missed a good deal on the HP Officejet 4500 at PC World). I don't do a lot of printing, I mainly try and reduce the amount of paper I consume but for when I might actually print something, I considered this. In all fairness, I think a separate scanner might be better because the last printer I had broke because I hadn't used it enough.
My personal experience over recent years is that HP are really the only company to go with for document-proccessing peripherals (printers and scanners, essentially). Most of the other breeds that I've dealt with have usually ended with an inordinate amount of effort and incompatibility. My only real other reccomendation would be to go for old, but well made over disposable. When looking for printers/scanners, I usually trawl ebay for proffesional-grade devices being scrapped after office use. These are generally made better, and sturdier than the consumer variants, and are usually more comaptible with other stuff (drivers, etc. being a fairly hefty part of it). I think I do have a MF Officejet kicking around the house somewhere, along with a decent grade scanner that I've never persued too far.
I would recommend Brother on top of HP. I have a Brother MFC-420CN at home that I've used for at least 7 years and it has not had any hiccups, that's right, not even a jammed piece of paper!
Yeah, I did trawl eBay and this seemed ideal, except I can't find any Mac drivers for it so it doesn't look like it'll work on OSX. I also like the look of the Scansnaps but the prices seriously put me off lol. I only need this for computerising my mail that I get - I had taken to using the work machines to scan it to the scan server and then cut and paste off but thought I probably shouldn't be scanning personal documents to a shared print server.
