Home scanner recommendations

Have a bunch of old documents and photos I'd like to scan to digital storage. Anyone have any particular scanning unit they like? 

Documents are easy - almost anything will do. What are you planning to do with the photos? If you need high quality scans for reprinting, retouching, or enlargement, you may need to look for something focused on that kind of output.

Mostly family photos to keep organized by year/decade. Have several hundred. Would like the capability to enlarge a few at some point. Obviously need a good quality unit.

There may be a photo service near you that can do that.

Depending on the cost it may be better than scanning everything and ending up with a piece of office equipment taking up space.

I just realized I didn't post this in Off-topic discussion

In reply to drainoil :

I can move it for you. 

Our home printer recently died and my scanner's been acting weird, so we recently bought an all-in-one. For about $140, we purchased an HP OfficeJet Pro 8025. So far, totally happy with it.

Are they film negatives or prints? If they are negatives you want something from the Epson V series. If they are just 35mm negatives, an Epson V370 will work well and it will do regular documents as well. 

FYI scanning negatives is a huge time sink. 

David S. Wallens said:

Our home printer recently died and my scanner's been acting weird, so we recently bought an all-in-one. For about $140, we purchased an HP OfficeJet Pro 8025. So far, totally happy with it.

Thank you David! And for moving this thread. 
 

rodknock, mostly prints not many negatives.

I have had good results with my Epson scanners, BUT they never issue updated drivers for a new version of Windows. I keep a running Windows 95 machine just for that. Prints I scan with a Cannon all in one. Works great, and updated driver was free when Windows went from 7 to 10.

In reply to drainoil :

Negatives are whole different thing. If you only have a few it's probably best to have a service do them, as you need a specialized scanner with a backlight, and even then there are many factors in getting decent, printable scans from negatives, especially color.

For prints, you should be able to scan at ~2400dpi initially, but expect to have to do some color correction for reprints to match the originals, or if you want to adjust for fading and other degradation. I strongly suggest you avoid using scanner sharpening (beyond perhaps a very small amount if necessary - some scanners can be pretty soft, but their sharpening tends to be very aggressive) and automatic correction, and do that work manually later on with Photoshop or GIMP or whatever. You'll get much better results in the prints.

I've been using a Canon 8800 for years, but that's a film scanner, so probably overkill for your needs. I think the 9000 is the current version in that line.