What is a good/inexpensive photo/scanning program?

[Mr. Baloo]

I have an HP 932p ink jet printer, and a epson 1240 scanner with the capability to scan 42bit color. Both are really nice peices of equipment, but from now on I will recommend that all scanners and printers be of the same manufacturer, things just work better that way.

Anyway, I have ended up using the HP photo printing program for most of my scans of 35mm pics, but if I scan a picture more than 100MB it seem to lock up my computer? I have 384 MB of RAM and a 866mhz processor? Doesnt seem this should happen?????

Any help? I also tried the new software (photostudio) with my Canon S50, and the scans look grainy????

[steve]

Try VueScan, find it here:

http://www.hamrick.com/vsm.html

And check out these sites for tips:

http://www.scantips.com
http://www.scanhelp.com/index.html

-Steve

[bcoultry]

a picture more than 100MB it seem to lock up my computer

Do you really mean 100 meg and not, say, 10 meg? With all the other processes using RAM while you've got 100 meg stuffed in there, I'd think your computer would most definitely choke. Maybe it's time for more RAM.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by bcoultry

Do you really mean 100 meg and not, say, 10 meg? (

Barbara,
It's dead easy to clock up huge files when scanning. If using a filmscanner at 2700dpi, a 35mm image is 9.8 megapixels which uses 27MB of memory, and there may well be several copies in memory at once. At a high-quality 4000dpi this is more like 59MB. On a flatbed, if you scan an A4 print at 300dpi it's going to come to about 8 megapixels, so huge files are easy to create.

But the good news is that a decent scanner program (such as Vueprint, as mentioned by Steve) will handle these sizes OK using Windows' virtual memory. This applies even on antique machines like my 400MHz Pentium II with 320MB RAM. Nevertheless, as you say, the more RAM the better.

[bcoultry]

as you say, the more RAM the better

Without question. When I was in the market for a new computer, besides getting the fastest one I could afford, I made sure to have a gig of RAM installed. That RAM was the best computer decision I'd made in a long time along with getting Windows XP--goodbye to waiting for Photoshop to process changes and goodbye to incessant blue screens.

[PeterP]

Yup, I started out with 512meg and was not long before I got another 512meg to max out my current mother board at 1gb.

Last time I looked memory was not very expensive.

What version of windows do you have? There used to be an issue with earlier windows(95 & 98 I think) and going over 768meg. Been quite happy with XP.

The other thing is free space on your HD. If you want windows to use it as virtual memory and photoshop sets up its own work disk space. It helps to have a nice big chunk of free disk space. I think PS even recommends allocating its workspace on a seperate physical drive for best performance.

[bcoultry]

Peter is absolutely correct about Photoshop working better when its scratch disks (hard drive space used as if it were memory) are on separate drives or partitions.

[voxmagna]

.........The other thing is free space on your HD. If you want windows to use it as virtual memory and photoshop sets up its own work disk space.............

If you think you've got enough memory and the hard drive light is on a lot - then you haven't! I've got 886Mb of ram in a 1Ghz Athlon running under Win98SE. Even working with large TIFFS and a couple of image files open, I rarely see the HDD led on. Fast DDR memory and latest CPU's are now the thing for big image file tasks.

When you scan, capture and edit a file, your pc is actually handling TWO copies of the file - one is the undo copy in most image software packages. If you regularly want to run max colour bit depth and res. scanning large output file sizes, then memory and processor speed will also play a part unless you like going for cups of tea a lot! Even so, if your pc resources are slow or caching to your HD a lot then along comes a few service interupts in the middle of disc cache operation and your scan might bomb out after waiting a long time. I used to have a similar problem with large res. printouts. so I now prefer the pc to spool from large ram rather than HD cache, and I never multi task with other non-essential programmes running. Always check what's running at startup in the background - and lighten the load!

I did once have a pc memory fault cause this problem and it's worth doing a 'walk test' to check it. As memory is rarely used fully, most image intensive software will soon find any stuck cell or timing issue. VOX