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question regarding scsi scanners for earlier systems

chelseayr

Well-known member
so I had been watching the apple one scanner auctions for a while (still cursing myself for losing a canadian located one at a modest price!) but now finally had to ask if there is any particular other previously-popular suggestions I could look into too?

just want it to be supportable by 7.6 (which may put some 'late' models out of the running) but otherwise have no other requirements of it (I mean if it supported aux flatbed peripherals then I maybe could use it at some point but otherwise mm yeah)


either way just in case anyone wanted to ask: regarding my lost-on auction remark above, lets say that I had bid a small price early on then a few days later put in a second bid as to be the winner again on the last day for around $150. but when I managed to recheck ebay again shortly after the ending date I had lost to someone else by a single dollar .. I gladly would had bid $160 if I could go back to that auction but ah well history is history so I'm not going to brood about this one :->
 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
You always lose an auction by a dollar if yours is the second highest bid., The winning bid can be a hundred dollars higher than the listed winning amount, but another buck is all it takes and you'll never know how much you really missed it by.

Take a look at the Epson E series, that's what served me well in the 90s.
 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
Do you have to have an Apple scanner? UMAX made some decent SCSI scanners in the late 1990's that should work on Mac OS 7/8. I have a 1200s I think and used it on one of my Quadra 950's to scan some large images from magazines ages ago.
 

trag

Well-known member
I also liked the Umax SCSI scanners. I was especially fond of my Astra 600S because it had a 14" long bed, instead of the standard 11". That makes it possible to scan a both leaves of many books with one scan.

The problem with the 600s is that the glass is held onto the frame with double sided tape and the tape has worn out by now.

I tried to replace it using various industrial 3M double sided tape, but it wouldn't hold.

Foolishly, I threw it away. I should have just epoxied it in. What difference, tape or epoxy? I don't know what I was thinking. Maybe I was exhausted from my tape experiments. I miss that scanner.

Like jt wrote, Ebay bidding settles on the bid of the second highest bidder plus a fixed increment. So if the highest bid is a $1000 and the 2nd highest bid is $100, the item sells for $100 + c ~= $105, depending on c. C changes depending on the price. At lower prices it's $.50 or $1.00. As the bids get higher, c grows.

Or, at least, that's how it used to work.

This encourages people to place the highest amount they're willing to pay and then forget about it. If no one else wants it, you're not penalized for placing a high bid. If the item is in demand, then your prospective "price" increases until someone else outbids you.

The fly in the above ointment is crazy people. They don't know what they're willing to pay, but they'll outbid you. So they see the item for $30, and they bid $35. If that doesn't put them in the lead, they bid $40, then $45, then $50, until they've just outbid you and incidentally driven the price way up.

If you wait until the last moment to enter your highest price, the loser above bids $35 on an item that is currently $30, and your bid of $100 wins at a price of about $36.
 

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
I had a UMAX Vista S-6E (they later dropped the Vista from the model) that served me well in the 90s. Worked with both PCs and Macs, even on OS X with VueScan. I also had acquired an Apple Color OneScanner 600/27 with my beige G3. Quality seemed decent and it worked on PCs and Linux using Canon CanoScan 300 drivers since Apple simply rebranded it.

I wouldn't really go crazy chasing any of these though. A modern USB scanner would likely cost the same and absolutely blow them away on quality.
 

chelseayr

Well-known member
thanks, noticed a few umax's so will watch that name too

@trag I guess sometimes weird things does just happen tho...
there was an estate-sold harness (as in the 'I know nothing, look at the photos please' type) that I was first bid on near starting price but it ended with me far down, only for me to later think I was looking at the same thumbnail in search result so I had to look out of curiousity and sure enough it was basically the same auction but with a big 'THIS IS THE THIRD TIME I HAD TO RELIST, PLEASE DO NOT BID IF YOU CAN'T PAY SHIPPING COST!' text. not surprisingly my same small bid was the winner this second time around and yep I paid it just a few hours later...
or what about managing to get one of these philips-made applevideo vga adapter item for free as a part of another item's purchase
 

trag

Well-known member
I wouldn't really go crazy chasing any of these though. A modern USB scanner would likely cost the same and absolutely blow them away on quality.

Yes. What he said. Although, darn it, I haven't seen a modern scanner with a 14" long bed.
 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
Do they still make decent scanners? For while people just purchased inkjet printer/scanner/copiers so I figured standalone scanners were not being made except for high end ones with duplex feeding etc (or just copier machines with PDF functions).
 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
I had a Microtek Scanmaker E3, which was the budget color model around 1997 or so, and it was decent. Microtek made a lot of different SCSI models, but be careful if you shop eBay because they did sometimes make SCSI and PC parallel port models with dangerously similar names.

Anyway, I fondly remember playing with the Mac software for that scanner running inside BasiliskII, so I know for sure it worked with System 7.
 

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
They still make standalone scanners. I have an Epson Perfection v600 which they have been selling for over a decade now. Its CCD based, not CIS.

Both the UMAX and Apple scanners I had only had a 11.7in bed (suitable for ISO A4 sized pages). The only 14in bed scanner I've had thru here was a HP ScanJet 4c (also SCSI).
 

Daniël

Well-known member
Do they still make decent scanners? For while people just purchased inkjet printer/scanner/copiers so I figured standalone scanners were not being made except for high end ones with duplex feeding etc (or just copier machines with PDF functions).

They still sell higher end flatbeds, mostly because they can do film scanning, making them appealing for film photography shooters, and people needing to digitize old film.
 

chelseayr

Well-known member
not to bring this thread up again almost two months later but I sometimes wonder if its simply the perceive of the apple logo itself or is there something else thats making the onescanners so special compared to similar-generation non-apple scanners?
(and yes I'm hoping to finally buy an umax in janurary unless something else comes up in this house)
 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
I sometimes wonder if its simply the perceive of the apple logo itself or is there something else thats making the onescanners so special compared to similar-generation non-apple scanners?
"yes".

Apple built its own peripherals during the '80s and '90s both because they knew they could charge more for them than the same thing might sell for in the open market, because of the cachet of an Apple thing, and, in theory, so that they had something they were supporting on their own that worked well.

Lots of people want something that Just Works and in theory setting up a OneScanner is going to require the least legwork.

I suspect the actuality of the situation is that a OneScanner is going to be just about as difficult to get going on any beige Mac as any other scanner, but you also get people who want to visually complete a system. The original OneScanner visually completes a Mac II+LaserWriter II setup and the later Color OneScanners visually complete a mid-'90s era setup.

Do they still make decent scanners?

What's "decent" in this context? If I remember right, I looked around when this thread came up the first time and what i mostly found was that "low end" stand-alone scanners mostly fell out of the market, having been replaced either by AIO machines (which are IME pretty good for everyday needs) and automatic document feeders or task-specific scanners (even low end ones like cheap dedicated film scanners that are just cheap cell phone cameras in a housing.)

It'll be interesting to see if AIO printers eventually fade away in favor of smaller or hopefully better standalone printers now that Apple/Google/Microsoft all have tools to "scan" documents using a phone camera.

Now that millennials are entering middle age and are sending their kids to college and have mid-level administration jobs, stand-alone flatbed scanners will make a comeback as a retro toy for people who enjoyed assembling PDFs by hand in pirated copies of acrobat 5 /s
 

chelseayr

Well-known member
thanks for that nice reply cory

even then while looking at another onescanner auction I realized something I never really thought much about before. why do some particular onescanner's seem to have two scsi ports while some have just one?
(I can maybe imagine why the former scanner may be in the middle especially with sometimes-removed external drive being at the actual end of scsi chain instead but still)

edit: before I forget I was just thinking about that now .. I think one 'problem' against AIO's is the way the company treats it as one single whole unit with no sense to it in the name of that why should a simply scanner refuse to work just because one printer cartridge is empty/removed? and I'm not making that up I have actually seen some stories through varying non-news sources online
 

lisa2

Well-known member
Years ago I purchased a NOS Apple OneScanner to use with my Lisa running MacWorks Plus. It's hard to find a scanner works with 68000 B&W systems ( the OneScanner does, this is what makes it so special ) , most require ColorQuickDraw that requires a 68020 or better. I set it up, did a few scans and that was it. While it worked well, it was huge and took a large amount of desk space. The SCSI cabling was bulky and it was always in the way. So back to went into the box and sat on my shelf for years. Years later I gave away it to another collector and never looked back... I also gave the same guy my ThunderScan and LightningScan setups.
 
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