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Recently I’ve wanted to scan some photos to be able to archive them. I thought my all-in-one HP printer/copier/scanner was pretty good. I had been using it for documents I wanted to archive, and it did well. I was shocked when I started to scan in photos, though. As you can see from the image below, it tired to enhance the image, which I cannot turn off, and it looks like there was a really heavy Photoshop filter applied to it. I even tried VueScan to see if it would do a better job. I got the same results.

So, I decided that I would research some new scanners just for the fun of it. Turns out there are some pretty good ones for under $100 now. I got a Canon CanoScan LiDE 90 after a little research. I liked that it was powered by USB only, and used LEDs for illumination. That dramatically cuts down on warm up time. The resolution was also about double the HP all-in-one. I went from 600 to 1200 dpi, and it really made a difference. Check out the same photo scanned with the LiDE 90.

I’m pretty impressed, and the scanner only cost $80 including shipping and rush processing. It scans very quickly and is small and light enough to be portable for the weekends. The only draw back is the software for it. The driver looks like something ported from Windows 3.1 to OS X. It’s not pretty, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

My computer at work has been supers low lately. And I found out I only have a gigabyte of RAM. Since I run InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Distiller, Entourage, Safari, Firefox, Twitterific and several other apps all at the same time, I think I need a little more than that.

Our database interface application, AdSpeed, takes up the most resources. But, it’s written in Java, so I can understand why.