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Share your Apple Color OneScanner Scans here!

MindThreat

Well-known member
As with many of the Apple devices I’ve acquired over the past year or so, I wasn’t even aware Apple made or had branded-scanners manufactured.

Originally I had the VisionPort scanner due to the intent being a completely portable retro mobile office (just for fun, obviously ;-)). However, I never could get the unit received to function with either of my Macs.

Somehow I stumbled upon the Apple Color OneScanner 600/27 completely by accident. Then stumbled upon one that looked to be in relatively clean condition for a cheap price, so I got it.

Anyone who has used the recent cheap multifunction printer scanner combos can surely relate to my disgust with the overall lack of quality scans these units provide outside of a quick text document scan. Even then, they appear to be suffering greatly in regards to quality. Part of my push too is that I always remembered the 90s scanners having such good quality scans.

Bringing me to last night. I received the scanner in an unsatisfactory shipping state but somehow the entire unit not only held up but works! Here are a few magazine scans from July 1981, exactly 41-years ago using 1996/97 tech!
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The Setup for first test then on the Kanga since the 1400 kept running out of RAM.

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Blown away with both the image quality scan and also the printed quality images for being a 1981 magazine - the National Geographic.

In particular, if you happen to have the 1200 variant of this scanner, I’d be interested in seeing some of your scans to compare against the previous model. Would also be cool to see if anyone actually still uses these scanners and any images you may be willing to share scanned in with your particular model.

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MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
That’s pretty cool. I had a Scanman 32 and last year I acquired one, and the quality was worse than I remembered it being.

Your images look really good. How long did it take to scan and complete each one?
 

MindThreat

Well-known member
That’s pretty cool. I had a Scanman 32 and last year I acquired one, and the quality was worse than I remembered it being.

Your images look really good. How long did it take to scan and complete each one?
About a minute at 600, slightly faster at 300. Actual scan time probably 15 seconds. I didn’t time it but seemed about a minute to place, click through the dialogs and scan it in. Takes longer for the Mac to manipulate the image if you’re doing any editing. Saving such a large file takes about 15 seconds in itself lol
 

davidg5678

Well-known member
It's amazing (and frustrating) that scan times haven't seemed to improve with more modern scanners. It takes my scanner (a fairly nice and modern Epson v600?) so long to initialize and respond to commands compared to the actual scanning time. There are some faster auto-feed scanners now that didn't seem to exist in the past, but unfortunately they aren't delicate enough to handle the 100+ year old photos/papers I've been scanning. The quality of this Apple scanner seems pretty great for such an old machine --at first glance on par with new machines. I've seen some terrible quality scans from brand new multifunction printers, and this definitely beats them.
 
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