New scanner

We bought a new scanner today, an Epson Perfection 1660. We got it from PC World for £119, which is actually less than you would pay at most web shops. Not that I knew that before I went in to the shop. I went along to PC without having done my on-line reasearch to find out what the state of the scanner market is. A foolish move.

But on the other hand, I’m not a professional photographer or a graphic artist, so my needs are pretty basic. In the end, I chose the Epson for the following reasons:

• It has a USB2 interface, so it should be nicely fast. I don’t have USB2 on my PC yet (old-style USB only), but I will eventually.
• It has a built-in transparency adapter, so it can scan 35mm photo negatives and positives (slides). That’s cool. I didn’t know that this is now a common option on mid-priced scanners.
• It’s from a well-known brand. I think this is the fourth scanner we’ve had since 1995, and it’s the first one we’ve bought that wasn’t the cheapest unbranded thing we could find. Considering I’m not clued up about scanners in general, I figured that I couldn’t go too far wrong with an Epson.

As expected, the software that comes bundled with the scanner is rubbish, but that’s okay because all I need is the basic drivers. I’ll be using Paint Shop Pro 8 for everything else. (More about PSP 8 some other time. I’ve only started working with it, but already I can tell I’m going to love it. It’s slower than 7, and it’s a bit of a resource hog, but being able to write scripts for it makes up for a lot.)