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SmartLF Scan! 36" Scanner[/QUOTE]
We have a 36" scanner as well as the A3 size -11.625x17 scanner on our Color and on our Black and White high speed copier. When you go to Wide Format scanners there used to be a couple options, 1 was the scan used fiber optics & Led lighting and only could scan thin originals, paper or BC type weights. The other was they were much more expensive and had lenses 2 or 3 or more across and could scan depth of possibly 1/4" or more. The problem with the lenses is they could go out of adjustment and needed calibrating so if you were not across the street from the seller you had a big bill. Our 1st used wide format was a Colortrac with lenses and it went in the recycling as a result of not being able to service it but that was a decade ago. The next was another brand Fiber Optic style that just works within the limitations of thin material. The general rule of thumb is if they provide a longer warranty they trust it.
I'm not sure I would be so desiring portable, ours came with a stand and a brilliant canvas catch tray so when we put the original in it goes out the back and down into the catch tray where it can be picked up from the front and put onto pile 2 of the originals face down to keep it in order. There are lots of options for scan, auto deskew, black etc the most important actually being to set it on to width but longer than it is and auto so when you insert the original it scans, thinks the item is longer sees the end, adjusts accordingly, saves to disk, spits it out, waits for your next. Unless the item were needing enlarging I settle for 300 dpi, color, jpg. Why, quite simply you need to scan color to save to jpg and that if/when batch converted to greyscale after is the most compact file size, and in Color or GreyScale you can increase or decrease the brightness to pick up the fine details of a washed out old blueprint to keep it readable, basically you have the most photo information available for adjustments. This makes every scan usable, prior to that I could scan an item more than once trying to get the right setting. I know that jpg is supposed to have the risk of introducing artifacts etc but that's when saving and re-saving so resolutions and quality continue to drop, re-save at maximum quality you can when adjusting.
Most days that scanner sits and its generally useless for fine art because of frames or thickness but we've had some nice batches of old blue prints like a couple thousand dollars of scans at a time where people were digitizing their old factory or hospital type schematics. Sometimes its just a small amount for scanning but followed by multiple large format prints that we would not have got otherwise for our HP Latex.
Regards the Canvas type art, normally we scan those off the glass of our color copier and digitally join the photos, Resolution wise for photos generally anything that can do 2 times the lines per inch of final print is as much detail as you want. 150 lpi makes a good ouput so that means scanning at 300 dpi, however if you were doubling the size of the output you would need 600 dpi scan. The other caveat I've read is that you can only get up to about 600 dpi of a paper photo anyway before you are bumping into the limits of the original so above 600 dpi on a paper scanner is marketing hype. Now if you are talking slides that is another story with much higher resolution scans required.
