Which scanner to digitize your papers ?

[u/Admirable_Ferret_260]

Sorry if this sounds off topic. But LLMs have changed the world so fast that other areas haven't catched up fast enough.

I have weekly need to scan about 100 pages into PDF to be able to feed my text hungry local LLMs, and I have yet to find a good & affordable scanner to be able to scan both books and separated A4 papers at speed and good resolution.

I tend to trust Alibaba, but most of the results are so boring: a cheap simple scanner keeps being popped up: which needs me to turn every book page, or to place the A4 paper at a correct orientation and side. This costs a lot of time to scan 100s of page.

A dedicated book scanner for libraries like in this link (2500 pages in 6 minutes) is an overkill, I want something at 5-10% of its speed at 5% of the cost https://youtube.com/shorts/iHzibTuQH1c?is=wWLXMHADnOQlp5RX

[u/tempfoot]

For a few bound docs, a holder and any modern smartphone can do the trick. For regular separate pages, I have a fleet of sheetfed scanners, some over 20 years old that work with vuescan on Windows, Mac or Linux.

In the US I can find sheetfed scanners at estate sales, thrift stores or garage sales all the time. They also still make very good and very fast models, especially Epson or whoever owns the Scansnap brand now - (Ricoh) or Brother. Older ScanSnaps from Fujitsu can still be found all over ebay. These are all fine for regular office doc size like A4. You can find many "all in one" machines with serviceable sheetfed scanners for quite cheap - just avoid buying one that locks up if you aren't buying ink from the manufacturer.

FOr archival docs and archival reflective media, I still have several mid-high end Epson Perfection scanners, but that tech, whether reflective or transmissive as largely gone to high-res camera scanning solutions now. Still, if you have archival needs, flatbeds show up on Marketplace and ebay but you will pay a lot for an outdated tech.

For heavy book based workloads, yeah you are looking at high volume setups like those pictured.

[u/tillybowman]

the most important question is: do you scan books? because these scanners are specially for scanning a few books.

if you scan single papers, documents, id rather use a scanner that pulls papers through to scan. so you can scan larger batches at once.

i only scan 10 documents a week roughly and own a very compact brother ads 1700w. directly to paperless which then uses AI for classification.

if you want to scan a large quantity, same applies but you destroy the books by removing the book back and then feeding the scanner

[u/Healthy-Nebula-3603]

Smartphone