I was just wondoring what the best scanner software out there is. I have an old scanner whose software that comes with it doesnt like XP (crashes everytime I try to use it) so I am looking into investing a better scanning program. Any suggestions?

moving to software support.

I used to use GrimsPing to use for this you can find it at the website!

Omnipage 11 is very good for text and Abode Photo plus deluxe is good for images



Last edited by ernest at Aug 12 2002, 02:22 PM

Abby FineReader 6.....

I suppose the first question would be - is it your software or your scanner drivers that are crashing .. a number of scanners won't work/work poorly in XP because the model is no longer supported, or the manufacturer is no longer around.

Now if your scanner works properly and you have OfficeXP - you can scan directly into office apps - images or text recognition.

If you need additional software, i agree with Ernest ... Omnipage Pro 11 and Adobe Photo Deluxe are a great combination.

But if your drivers don't work .. you'll need to invest those software $$ in a new scanner - which may not be a bad idea in the first place. $75 to $100 buys a good scanner (much better than what you likely have) and you should get a good software pac with it too.

That's my two cents.

I agree with road worker. ABBYY FineReader 6.0 is a pretty good program. The scanned products are very customizable.

Thank you everyone for your replies. I do believe the scanner itself is fine and hunky dorey with winXP, it finds the scanner and installs it just fine. However, after I installed the scanner software that came with the scanner and tried to run it... the software crashed everytime I tried to open it. That is why I think it is the software that needs updating (its old software... before XP was released).

Glad the scanner works ... have you tried installing your old software in a different compatability mode? Also, do you have Norton Antivirus installed? I've got an old scanner that works just find on XP, but it has a major conflict with NAV - no matter what software i try (it's an old storm imagewave, btw). It may also be the same for other antivirus software as well.

and thanks Road worker and AsianElvis i was checking on Fineprint ..seems to have some good features ... saw a comparison with omnipage pro at -http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,20282,00.asp



Last edited by Blue at Aug 14 2002, 06:18 PM

@ Shiromagius

As long as your scanner is TWAIN compatilbe, and XP installs working drivers,
it all comes down to WHAT type of things you want to scan, and what you will use it for.

Like photos / text / documents .. whatever...

If you will be scanning photos, allmost ANY photoedit program will do the work for you :)
You even have a builtin program in XP that will do most of what you need.

Get the trial version of PaintShop Pro, from Jasc, and see if you like it,
than save yourself a lot of money and buy that instead of Adobe Photoshop.

Cheers :)


Edit :
What type ( brand/model ) of scanner do you have, and have you checked the producers homepages for an update ?




Last edited by BearCat at Aug 15 2002, 04:34 PM

well I tried Abbyy FineReader last night - they have a free demo ... found it had excellent OCR, but crashes my old Storm scaner when i use the wizard ... it will run sometimes under the manual settings ... but still seemed buggy ... when it worked, loved the OCR and the spell check ... was disappointed to see that it put every text box on a separate page when saved to ms word ... also found when reading from an image file , it needed several steps to read it. So for me omnipage pro works better.

Note to Bearcat: you're right Adobe Photoshop would be overkill ... i think Ernest was referring to Adobe PhotoDeluxe - discontued by adobe last month, but still available for about $50. It's specifically designed for scanning and a lite version is include with many scanners.

I'm using Ulead Photo Impact 7.0, fast and intuitive. Works fine for me. :)



Last edited by glufamichl at Aug 17 2002, 11:26 PM

A new scanner will be a good idea ;)

It cames with software and works with XP (in most case)


I have to buy a new one in the futur because mine is an Mustek 600 USB and it don't work with XP and I receive a message from mustek saying they will not work to make drivers for an old scanner :o

I use an HP6200C scanner. I never needed any software for it. Works fine with XP for pictures or documents. But if you need OCR, then use OmniPro.