I have been drawing traditional art more often. However, my only option for posting them online is through a phone camera. It is very very difficult to get good lighting and positioning, to the point I started taking photos outside in the sun just to have them look bright enough.

I'm wondering what options I have for accessing a scanner that wouldn't be too expensive. Are there ones I can buy? Do print shops offer scanners as well? I would also accept better photo taking techniques if any

Dedicated flat beds are the way to go, but... Good luck finding a decent one that isn't a stupid printer.

When looking at title, and before reading, I was tempted to make a joke "I just use my phone!" but yeah, for traditional art -> scanning to computer, it's far easier to use a scanner.

There ARE rigs that you can use to get better photos from a stationary camera. https://www.wired.com/2009/12/diy-book-scanner/ These are better for when you're going to post-process to add OCR (text recognition), tilting/cropping for alignment, and so on. More DJVU than TIFF.

Kind of funny, but for stop-motion animation techniques, this is actually required, since a scanner is kind of useless for 3D scenes. http://raindropmoment.com/stopmo/ Source

Old school scanners that needed a parallel or SCSI port were infamously slow (and used inefficient protocol to boot!) and had horrible 'blue out'(All scans look blue without color calibration - and the calibrating lowers your effective number of color bitplanes). I suspect that newer ones would be far better. I'm currently looking up one for my own interests. I have at least one printer with one but those are even more awful than cheapest dedicated flatbed unit. XD

BRB with my research. I'm actually looking for one with at least 10 bits-per-color (16-bit grayscale would be better but I doubt I'll find one).

oops

kora_viridian said:
The public library is probably not a good idea for NSFW stuff. In theory, they don't care, but in practice, it's up to whether the art squicks the librarian(s) on duty or not.

Also, photocopiers will keep low-res copies of documents processed, in most cases. Even if not doing NSFW scans, this might annoy some people.

Yeah, I just assumed they wanted their own scanner. You're right - just use library's or office store's!

kora_viridian said:
The Canon ones I mentioned in my other reply claim to have "48-bit" color depth, which I suspect means 16 bits per channel x 3 channels. The cheap one is 2400 dpi optical and the fancier one is 4800 dpi optical.

I've never tried either model in person; that's just what the specs say.

After doing some research, I realized it's been a LONG time since I looked for a new scanner. 48-bit-color is a standard feature now! Annoyingly, some only provide 24-bit-color externally, so you have to double-check the specs. The real issue I see is driver support. Some companies have really awful software. Quick example of an older-generation scanner, with 48-bit support: https://www.ebay.com/itm/275361781040 "Visioneer One Touch 8700 USB 1200 X 4800 DPI 48 Bit Color Flatbed ScannerVisioneer One Touch 8700 USB 1200 X 4800 DPI 48 Bit Color Flatbed Scanner"
That one might actually be fine for what I want, but is a bit slow, and driver support would be iffy.

The catch here is that some of them refuse to operate the scanner part unless you also have a full set of ink cartridges installed. Man, this bullshit right here! Another reason AiO printers are awful for scanning, not including that they're huge eyesores.

Yeah, some will let you scan directly to SD cards, many will require an attached PC, and very few will support scanning over Wifi?

The thing with multiple(or diffuse!) light sources for cell phone/USB cameras is mentioned in that Wired article?

Try Craigslist. You could get it closer to $20. Hopefully not with a chonky printer attached.

Scout out your libraries. Some are busy, others are very empty. Some have a row of computers near lots of foot traffic, others might have one in the corner with a scanner. If you can find some kind of isolated "media lab", that might work even better. The scanner quality could be far beyond what you can afford too. Imagine ending up with a 300 MB TIFF image from the highest settings.

lance_armstrong said:
Try Craigslist. You could get it closer to $20. Hopefully not with a chonky printer attached.

Scout out your libraries. Some are busy, others are very empty. Some have a row of computers near lots of foot traffic, others might have one in the corner with a scanner. If you can find some kind of isolated "media lab", that might work even better. The scanner quality could be far beyond what you can afford too. Imagine ending up with a 300 MB TIFF image from the highest settings.

LOL, I used to have a scanner that... could hit 100MB TIFFs. I was thinking CL or eBay or thrift stores, but if you're willing to live with a printer attached, people literally throw those away, and you can often force them to work without new cartridges.

Thanks for all of this advice! I did check my library and they do have a scanner there. They emailed the results to me. It might also support scanning to flashdrives so I could do that if I ever bring NSFW art.

My mom does have a printer-scanner-fax machine but it's quite small, and the results aren't very good as such. I will look into getting a flatbed, or one with the used printer. I would guess the size is usually 8.6 by 11, which my drawing pads are just a bit bigger than.

Some idea of a budget would be useful to know. You can get decent flatbeds for letter/A4-sized paper for around $70 new. What I have is very similar to this and was the same price, the only complaint I have is that it's fucking loud when it runs the scan.

ratte said:
Some idea of a budget would be useful to know. You can get decent flatbeds for letter/A4-sized paper for around $70 new. What I have is very similar to this and was the same price, the only complaint I have is that it's fucking loud when it runs the scan.

My budget right now is about $150, which seems to be more than enough based on the recommendations.

meerlin said:
I have been drawing traditional art more often. However, my only option for posting them online is through a phone camera. It is very very difficult to get good lighting and positioning, to the point I started taking photos outside in the sun just to have them look bright enough.

I'm wondering what options I have for accessing a scanner that wouldn't be too expensive. Are there ones I can buy? Do print shops offer scanners as well? I would also accept better photo taking techniques if any

In the meantime, you should consider using a scanner app for your smartphone, like Google PhotoScan. These apps are infinitely superior to using the phone's built-in camera app, as they stitch together several images taken with flash from different angles to produce a "scan" with uniform lighting.

Here is Google PhotoScan on the Play Store. I know it exists on the iOS App Store as well, and it should be pretty easy to find by searching.

For line art that you plan on editing, anyways, a camera is highly forgivable, especially if you have a rig to make sure lighting and position is uniform. For inked images (colored), that is awful, though. The thing that annoys people is when someone scans a comic book that way, or something. XD