Posts Tagged ‘natural drawing’

2 results.

Canon LiDE 100 Scanner

by Craig Lotter on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 08:50
Posted In: General Ramblings

Alright, now we’re in business!

My delivery from Take 2 arrived two days ago and I am now a proud owner of a beautiful black Canon LiDE 100 standalone scanner.

I mentioned the reasons for wanting a scanner previously in these pages and now that I have one, I can made the jump backwards of returning to producing my art on paper and then transferring it to the digital world instead of working completely digitally from step 1. Needless to say, this should bring some more natural lines to the table and I’m excited to be putting pen to paper once again!

And now on to the scanner itself.

It is actually quite a sexy piece of hardware you know, light, slim and sleek in it’s black finish, though it does suffer a bit from those horrible looking grey plastic buttons they went and planted on the front of the thing.

On the performance front, the Canon LiDE 100 is one of the cheaper models available so it won’t exactly knock your socks off in terms of speed, but it delivers solid and relatively fine grain scanning with numerous quality options available to you through the bundled application.

It can handle 2400x4800dpi resolution with 48-bit colour and the four cheesily named “EZ” buttons allow you to copy, scan, email or PDF at the touch of a button. The scanning lid is one of those Z-lid contraptions that allows you to deal with thicker document scans, though it probably wouldn’t handle something hefty like War & Peace of course.

As for my favourite part of the whole device, the scanner runs off a standalone Hi-Speed USB connection, meaning that it transfers data through and draws power from a single USB cable – no extra power cables lying around to trip over on the floor then!

So in short, I’m very happy with this purchase that works well and looks rather nice on my desk. The only qualm I do have is the fact that Canon has released no Linux drivers for the scanner and because they keep the driver code proprietary, no third party has yet been able to reproduce a usable driver for the Canon LiDE 100 under Linux – which of course means that is bye bye Ubuntu box and hello Windows laptop for all my scanning now. :(

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The High Price of Standalone Scanners

by Craig Lotter on Friday, April 16, 2010 at 08:50
Posted In: General Ramblings

I’ve decided that I need to lay my hands on a scanner.

The reason is pretty simple. A while back I moved to the straight digital path after laying my hands on a drawing tablet to use at home for my own purposes. Doing everything via the digital route definitely has its advantages in terms of speed for time to completion, but in the process I’ve noticed that what I produce is well… diminished in quality to say the least.

The problem of course lies rooted in a couple of factors, so I’ll try and lay them out here. First off is the whole breaking of the visual from the hand movements thing that comes with using a tablet, followed by the fair inability to naturally change hand orientation at will. Now of course, these could be circumvented by using a tablet system like an Apple iPad or even shelling out for a Wacom Cintiq product, but seeing as this is completely a free time hobby which I don’t pay all that much attention to, shelling out that kind of cash just doesn’t seem justifiable to me or my wife! After those two biggies, next comes the feel of the whole affair (nothing really beats pencil on paper), as well as to an extent the joy of seeing your work right in front of you, no matter where you may be.

Sure there are some great software and hardware solutions to tackle all of these, but like I said, I’m not really willing to spend a lot of money on this hobby of mine, so those are pretty much out of the question.

So the solution is of course to go back to pencil and paper, sketch out the drawing and then scan it in, before finally switching to the good old tablet to handle “inking”, colouring and of course lettering.

A slower process, but one which should definitely make the resulting pencils look a whole lot less stiff.

But here’s my bugbear then. Why in the world are standalone scanners so expensive?!? They’ve definitely gone up in price since the last time I purchased one (which was way back when admittedly), and are actually more expensive to buy in the standalone format than as part of an all-in-one scanner/fax/printer combo!

I’ve already got a printer, I don’t need another. All I want is a scanner you know…

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