Yes. The working part of these scanners is what's called a Line Scanner which was, at one time a CCD imager. These do degrade with power on hours and usage.
What you are looking for is OPTICAL RESOULUTION and not the interpolated values.
To do black/white scanning if I understand another post (why new posts if it relates to this quesion?) the issue is getting a good scan to print, or PHOTOCOPY function.
Scan to screen will never seem right since out PC screens are all of 75 to 150 DPI and that's that.
Scan to printer or "photocopy" functions are a small tarpit of issues such as you can't scan and print at 300 DPI without getting jaggies and same is true at 600 DPI. Scanning at say 1200 DPI and uncompressed even when printing at 300 DPI will give a good effect since you are letting the printer driver decide what to do with the extra bits.
Compressign the scan with JPEG would likely show distortions so try uncompressed images and take the time to test various compression offerings including scanning in B/W or greyscale.
Bob
hello folks,
I am in the process of making pdf's of sheet music still and I am starting to wonder if maybe I should think about buying a new scanner-- the one I have won't work in win2000 without new drivers that aren't very good, a lot of functionality is lost so i use it with my win98 machine. ALSO, while scans of color pix look very good, I am just wondering if these things wear out (black lines in the originals sometimes look all fuzzy in the scan version) and I'm wondering if budget level scanner technology has changed to the point where I should upgrade for that reason alone.
I don't know the specs of this thing any more, but they are so misleading-- they all claim to have one jillion dpi but that's not the real number as we all know.
any insights? advice? what to buy? etc . . . my current scanner is a microtek, cost $100 back in 1999- fj

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