Giant Time Suck

an actual scanned photo, at least how the scanner saw it.

the bums went wild and drove to our nearest chain store selling scanners (40 miles away). as in machines to digitize pictures and text. we have a very old one but it only connects to our legacy pc, and it is so old that the pirate had to shoehorn the software into windows XP, telling the operating system that, yes, we are risking TOTAL SYSTEM FAILURE by installing this unrecognized and unapproved software. it works quite well, but it doesn't scan slide photos.

we have long since switched to mac laptops (how cute, his and hers) so we went for a modern scanner that would scan slides as well as prints and documents. we came home with an HP scanjet 4070. 2400x2400 dpi! scan your slides! your photos! compatible with windows and macs!

the package was kinda light on documentation. not to worry. both the pirate and RD are computer savvy and very good at scoping out new hardware/software. RD's professional experience includes dealing with all sorts of scanners. we can do this. ok, software installed. scan a slide. wow, it did it, but pretty poor quality. oh yeah, the default dpi setting is 200. that's goofy but fixable. let's try this again. now we're cookin'. nice pictures. let's try a print. again, the default is 200 dpi, but it comes out pretty good. let's up the dpi to 300. uh oh. now we get the first picture again and again as a result of scanning any other picture!!!???? and it no longer scans just the picture but the entire area of the scanner, and sometimes omits the picture.

quit the program. start again. first picture scanned properly. and the same image repeated when we insert a different picture. this all took several hours because the thing is slower than snail mail. thankful for the hard learned lesson of saving all the packing, i put it all back in the box. we and the scanner will return to the store tomorrow. maybe we'll try an epson.