[tjrob]

Most home scanners, or printer-scanner-copiers are very slow when scanning.

Many libraries have book scanners that are much better: The scanners in two different local libraries are 3-5 times faster than my HP printer-scanner-copier, and they both scan right up to the edge, designed for the center binding of a book, so they avoid the shadow from the binding.

[adelara]

Since you mention scanning music, and I guess that's we do a lot, what has been the best experience so far ?
I just got myself "da whole package": a new Epson all-in-one printer; an ASUS TF701T, MobileSheets, and.. (drats, forgot about the page-turn pedal :-) ....
A "one time gig" came in so I thought I would give it a shot and experiment with different scan resolutions - i tried 600dpi and then 300dpi which cut the size in half, but still a hefty 3-6megs.
Next I tried .tiff which produced a 300kb size, so, is there anything you guys know that makes either choice better ?

[Mederiacvm]

Try scanning in pure black and white and a resolution of 200 of 300 dpi. That's how I get relatively small filesizes.

[Skip]

Since you mention scanning music, and I guess that's we do a lot, what has been the best experience so far ?
I just got myself "da whole package": a new Epson all-in-one printer; an ASUS TF701T, MobileSheets, and.. (drats, forgot about the page-turn pedal :-) ....
A "one time gig" came in so I thought I would give it a shot and experiment with different scan resolutions - i tried 600dpi and then 300dpi which cut the size in half, but still a hefty 3-6megs.
Next I tried .tiff which produced a 300kb size, so, is there anything you guys know that makes either choice better ?

You didn't say if you're letting the printer export a pdf file. When I did that with my Epson the file was huge also. Now I just scan to computer and use PDF Creator to convert [print] the file to a pdf.

[adelara]

Since you mention scanning music, and I guess that's we do a lot, what has been the best experience so far ?
I just got myself "da whole package": a new Epson all-in-one printer; an ASUS TF701T, MobileSheets, and.. (drats, forgot about the page-turn pedal :-) ....
A "one time gig" came in so I thought I would give it a shot and experiment with different scan resolutions - i tried 600dpi and then 300dpi which cut the size in half, but still a hefty 3-6megs.
Next I tried .tiff which produced a 300kb size, so, is there anything you guys know that makes either choice better ?

You didn't say if you're letting the printer export a pdf file. When I did that with my Epson the file was huge also. Now I just scan to computer and use PDF Creator to convert [print] the file to a pdf.

No. I tried letting the scan app (running on a Mac btw) to pack all in one .pdf which came out too big.
Then I tried using "Preview" which did a better job, but still is hampered by the big pics resulting from the scan.

Yes, I selected, B&W 600 dpi, then 300, still big. That's when I selected "Text" and it produced the .tiff image.

I guess it's all about experimenting with the settings, mainly on the scan application (which is very simple - or too simplistic) on the Mac.

Thanks for the replies.

[maintech]

I use an all in one printer, an Epson XP 300. I select the Professional mode, set it for Black & White, 200 dpi and save as pdf. and a typical 2 page song file is 50-60 kb. Providing the original score is sharp, the resolution on my Samsung Galaxy 12" tablet is fine. I have several that scanned at 600 dpi but the visual difference was very small so I keep it at 200.
I scanned in both of the Scott Houston's Piano Fake books and the total pdf size is 11 mb. 

Speed of scanning is a bit slow, but if you organize your workflow it can be improved. 

I scanned one book of 134 songs as a single pdf file, 11 mb large, and that saved some space over a similar number of songs individually saved as separate pdf's but the downside is the keeping tabs on what pages you select for MS. It is faster to work with individual pdf files, and there are fewer likely problems, like missing the last page of a song.

The Epson scanner will keep track of your songs, providing sequential numbers, and if you save each book to its own folder, named same as physical book, then locating where the songs are is just a matter of housekeeping.

I will admit that a sheet fed scanner would be ideal, and because I had Staples cut off the spine and re-bind my books with a spiral hinge, (to make it easier to keep pages open on the keyboard) pulling the books apart and re-assembling them is not difficult, so I'm keeping my eyes pealed for a used one!

Hope this helps.

David. I use a laptop Win 7 pro with the scanner

[GraemeJ]

I have a load of PDF scans from many different sources, apart from those I have done for myself, and there is a huge disparity of file sizes despite the fact that most contain the same number of pages. I find that Systools PDF Toolbox does a really good job of compressing them, whilst retaining legibility. It's actually better than Adobe's own software!

[Mnierop]

I have bought an All in one printer/scanner/copier Canon MG2450 this weekend, incredible cheap (€44,50 at the MediaMarkt) but it scans just fine. At 300dpi an average two page trumpet bigband score comes out at a few hundred Mb.. with a 32Gb SD card in my Tab 3, I can have thousands of pieces on my tab... Well, just started, I have scanned about 100 pieces now :-), keep PDF backups at my LG 2Tb harddrive...

I just scan the music I have in my bag that I get from my bands, so that are just 200-300 pieces that I need to scan right now, once that is done, I just need to scan the new pieces that are handed out now and then, and that are just a few at a time, so the All in one canon is just right for me, only the initial scanning of all the music in my gig bag keeps me busy the next few days :-) Also new pieces are handed out digitally more and more so that makes it super easy to use Mobilesheets.

But I do not really understand the need to scale down the PDF's, Mobilesheets does not seem to have any problem loading them and storage has become so cheap, that cannot be the problem either.. even the cheapest SD cards of 4GB to 16Gb can hold thousands of pages. Tablets with no SD-card slot have internal memories of at least 8Gb, if you do not take pictures and limit the use of the tab to Mobilesheets and maybe some basic other applications, I find it hard to believe that would not be sufficient for thousands of pages of music...