Semi-OT: recommend a fast, high-capacity sheet-fed scanner?

[Jim Battle]

listmailgoeshere at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> I'd like to pick your collective brains, if I may?
...
> So - does anyone know of a make/model scanner which has a high
> (ideally 100 pages or more) sheet-feed capacity, is fast (ideally
> SCSI, maybe USB2, Firewire is third choice) and produces good results
> for this sort of thing? New or secondhand is fine.

Get a scanner that does duplexing in a single pass.  This means it has 
CCDs on both sides of the paper.  Scanners which have a mechanical 
contraption to flip over each page are very much slower than if you read 
all the fronts, manually flip them over, and then read all backs.

I fell for the intentionally misleading HP description of their scanjet 
8270.  The summary description made it sound like it had dual CCDs, but 
in fact it doesn't.  I now use it only in simplex mode and scan fronts 
and backs in separate passes.

These days, for most pages, I scan 1 bpp @ 400 dpi.  I sometimes do 
covers in color if the original is in color, but then I also scan at 
lower resolution, since such covers often have only very large fonts on 
them and don't require 400 dpi.