Do You Scan On Your Mac? Use The Best Software.
In my office we have plenty of Macs, plenty of printers and more than our share of scanners.
What’s the best Mac software for scanning? Is it what comes with the scanner? Nope. It’s Silverfast Ai Studio.
Scanners have become something like printers. These days they’re fast and cheap. While a very good scanner can cost hundreds of dollars, very cheap scanners do credible scans.
For those of us involved in high volume, good quality scans, our software of choice is usually NOT the software that came with the scanner,.... (excerpted).
11 Reader Comments
kel willis said:
I’ve used both Vue Scan and SilverFast. Both are very good and if there’s a difference in their scans, at least in the less expensive version of SF, I can’t tell what it is. SF is easier to use, but it seems to me that the settings are roughly the same. It seems to me that I remember SF not having TWAIN support and needed a plug-in to run in Photoshop.
Art said:
I have always used Vuescan. The updates are OPTIONAL. It’s like watching a program on tv that you don’t like. Turn it off or turn the channel. No complaints for aggressive updates here.
Vuescan doesn’t splatter stuff all over your hard drive, as far as I know. It’s a small App and very easy to use. The interface is not as nice as SilverFast, from what I can see on their site, however.
Ian Orchard said:
My first choice for scanning is good ol’ Image Capture, buried deep in your Applications folder (Tiger and Leopard, maybe earlier). It doesn’t have the bells and whistles of the commercial stuff, but it handles everything I ask of it. You have to have your scanner connected and running when it launches or it will just grumble at you. Most folk assume it is for pulling images off a digicam, but it’s a useful scanning tool too.
dbhill said:
Well, dbcooper, now you see why I asked. I use ReadIris v.11 for Mac; it’s the best I’ve found. Yet it is not near good enough for regular office use. I always cringe at the hours of editing the OCR output. The best I can say is that it’s better than nothing.
~Dennis
dbcooper said:
Ugh, I hate OCR. Optical character recognition is one of those painful utilities we use at work which drives us nuts. It never, ever, never, never works right. Having to use it borders on employee abuse. If you find one that works, write about it in bold headlines.
dbhill said:
How can you talk about scanner software and not mention Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Do you not use OCR in your office? If so, I’d thrill to your thoughts about this, or write an article about it.
~Dennis
Cathy Wills said:
We use SilverFast in our photography studio. Best by far for high resolution scans. One of the problems we had with Vue Scan was the constant updates. It’s like there’s a new version every week. Sometimes a new version wouldn’t work on a scanner that worked fine the week before. Both are good, but we prefer SilverFast Ai Studio. It costs a little more but causes no pain.
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Hamish said:
I bought an HP 2840 all in one (colour laser printer, scan, fax and copy - with a sheet feeder!), in part because of the software bundle recommended over at MacSlash.
The software comes with ReadIRIS - but I also use Acrobat Professional which has built in OCR.
The HP software doesn’t work properly on Intel Macs - unless you change the setting under Get Info to “Open using Rosetta”.
I discovered HP have updated their drivers in late March 2008, and I successfully scanned a document yesterday after some angst.
The HP is hooked into my airport extreme base station, and I scanned wirelessly from my MacBook.
The HP comes with an ethernet port so is great.
We also use Microsoft Remote Desktop for a home based business - the windows terminal server isn’t working that well, so had to use Windows XP via Fusion to log in, and using Net2Printer software to do remote printing. Not ideal, but fixing the server is out of my control.