Scanner Doodles

Despite my long career as a Human Resource what works with computers and such, I have lost touch with the price/value ratio of pretty much all computers and accessories. I just lost enthusiasm for tracking that crap a long time ago.

However, I was recently in the market for a scanner. So, I started looking around and was completely surprised that many scanners are well under $100. Heck, some laser printers were $99 at the brick and mortar stores. Toner cartridges used to cost twice that! (A friend has pointed out that some still are which reveals a bit more than any of us want to know about certain business practices.)

But I wasn't looking for a printer. Just a scanner. They did have some combo units (scanner, printer, etc.) at the $100 price point, but I decided to just focus on what I wanted to get right now: a scanner.

I came across the CanoScan LiDE70 which you can find selling from $70 to $90. It's just a scanner and it doesn't require yet another power brick. It is powered from the USB bus.

I picked one up. I haven't used it much, but it seems to work well and fast (compared to my experience with previous generation models). The main beef I have with it right now is that it generates a highly annoying whine while it scans. Luckily I'm not scanning tons of documents, but if I knew it was going to sound like it does, I would have seriously considered another model (maybe the HP G3010).

I didn't mean this to sound like a review or anything. I haven't used that scanner enough to call it good or bad. I just wanted to express my astonishment of how inexpensive some technologies have become. I suppose it was inevitable, and certainly moving all manufacturing overseas seems to have paid off. Hopefully inexpensive does not mean shoddy in this case.

Anyway, when I need to take a mental break from my work as a Human Resource, you can often find me "mindlessly" filling pages of graph paper with doodles. Lately I've been using a red micro rollerball pen from Uniball that seems to be slowly running out of ink. The doodles are often tiny (I guess I'm trying to be inconspicuous), but here's a couple of silly examples of what my new scanner can pick up.



The grid, if you can make it out, is spaced at centimeter intervals. Teeny-tiny.