Usefulness of flatbed scanners for making an album to show the value of

With a flatbed scanner you can make full color albums of your entire collection. Which scanners are best?

When you visit coin shows you can bring along an inventory in full color of what you already have to show others. No need to drag around the coins, just scan them, print them with a color laser, and bind them at any repro shop.

You can enlarge your coins to check for quality (especially useful if you are considering buying a valuable coin). All you have to do is gently place the coin on the scanner bed, press the button, load the resultant image into Adobe Photoshop, and enlarge it as large as you wish. You will probably get a better image of your coin from a scanner than you would if you tried to take a picture with a camera (we tried, even using professional studio lighting).Of course if you are a professional photographer of coins for major auctions and catalogs you will use a camera and a pre-determined lighting situation made just for the low relief of coins. But at home, since it is unlikely you have a photo studio at hand, you can do a quicker and better job with a flatbed scanner.

I am not sure you can get this quality with a cheap scanner. In the FLAAR office we have a choice of several scanners. I prefer the Heidelberg Saphir Ultra2 (LinoColor Saphir Ultra2 in the USA). It comes with the renowned LinoColor software, the favorite of people in the prepress world. I find that SilverFast is easier for newcomers to use since people at home and in a normal office are not going to print their scanned slides on a Heidelberg press. Don't worry if SilverFast does not come in the bundle with the original scanner, just buy it separately afterwards. You can probably order it on-line from SilverFast.com. If you are looking for a cheap software then you will get sticker shock. SilverFast is good (and very easy to use). Thus it costs accordingly.

Most first-time users presume it is important to have solidly made scanner hardware, that is, the actually equipment. But scanning is primarily done by the software behind the hardware. If your cheap scanner includes cheap software you will get a cheap image. But with a better software you can actually obtain superior images than the scanner manufacturer's own original software.

Grading coins is tricky. In the 1970's many coin dealers overgraded when they sold and undergraded when they bought. I know because my father got scammed for several hundred thousand dollars when he bought them between 1970 and 1985. Then when he tried to sell them all kinds of dubious coin dealers came out of the woodwork, trying to buy the collection for pennies on the dollar. To really see the surface of a coin, scan it, then enlarge it with a laser printer. You will get quicker and easier results with a flatbed scanner than with a camera (we tried a camera and the images were noticeably superior with the flatbed scanner).

We finally found a major coin dealer that we trusted. Their two representatives were pleasant, did not even attempt any tricks, and told us the names of other major dealers we could get a second bid from. One dealer claimed he would offer "more than anyone," but he sounded fishy and untrustworthy. So in the end we sold the entire collection to the people we liked the most. They paid on the spot. They came to us, and did not try to trick us into sending the coins to them blindly. In any event, Andrea and I had scanned both sides of every coin in the entire collection (over 150 pages with up to 12 coins per page).

The fact we had a scanner with a color laser and could prepare such a record added considerably to the value of the collection. Indeed the color album we prepared added so much to the value of the collection (over what shysters offered from the simple typed list of coins, dates, and grades) that we could have bought a dozen scanners and a dozen laser printers with the added sales value.

Additionally, all the coin dealers who saw the color album realized that we were well prepared. In point of fact I knew nothing whatsoever about coin collecting but I did know about how to market a commodity.

Summary, if you have a coin collection which is worth over several thousand dollars, you might consider getting a flatbed scanner and laser printer. Don't make the mistake of trying to print multiple copies of a 150 page album with an Epson printer. First, most Epson printers off the shelf cannot handle text. Yes, no written words. The ads don't tell you that do they? You have to go buy a software RIP (Birmy makes the best, actually one of the only for the Epson).

Second, an Epson is so slow you will never have the patience to print a full 150 pages, much less to print ten copies.

Third, the ink will cost a fortune because if all the colors are together in one cartridge, the printer will refuse to print when the yellow is empty. The yellow will go empty first, then another color, and only at the end will the third color be empty. But the Epson's which have all the colors together, the printer is set up to force you to buy an entire new color cartridge when any one color is empty. More than that, I suspected that some of the printers (such as the Epson 1520) were timed to grind to a halt after about 20 or 30 prints, at which point the printer refused to print, with the message claiming it was out of ink. But I opened up the ink cartridge and found ink still inside (and certainly still inside the other two colors).

Why does the printer company do this? Besides wishing to increase their profits at your expense, the printer does this to make it impossible for you to add more ink with a syringe. Epson knows you can buy other ink and inject it with a syringe into their cartridges. This sort of practice should be declared illegal by consumer protection groups.

On a more pleasant subject, if you need a scanner to handle your coins which is the highest quality, check out the C-550 Lanovia from Fujifilm Electronic Imaging. If you wish to enter digital imaging at a slower pace and prefer to start off with a nice mid-level flatbed scanner, then go for the LinoColor (Linotype-Hell/Heidelberg) Saphir Ultra2. Be sure whatever scanner you select has a minimum true optical dpi of 1200 dpi. Don't be fooled by advertising claims of 99,999 dpi (that is pure fantasy dpi and useless for digital imaging)