11x17 (tabloid) scanners

For the scanners its true, you do get what you pay for, but the epson refurbishment program is nice for getting a little more than you can normally afford!

As for the couple of illustrations the top left and bottom right are computer Photoshop colored and the rest are traditional paintings. Sometime for fun I'll update it with all computer colored art.
I'll definatly have to check out Kaliedostar - thats hilarious - I may have to serch for some genga!

So got out of cel collecting for a while, was too much of a PITA to scan twice and merge the two images together. One would always be slightly crooked, or just a hair misaligned, or (what would always happen) is the lid of the scanner would be just slightly open so the overall cel would have a slight background gradient (usually faintly blue) that would make it very difficult to merge the two images.

Or for a douga, I'd have to make 4 scans, merge two create two images, then flip (through photoshop) one image. This was to get the color/shading thats on the back of a douga onto the front (line) part. Not fun.

One option was always to just scan the "important" part of the cel and forget about the registration holes and any notations. But that always bugged me.

So (getting to the point) I decided that if I was going to continue to cel collect, I needed a tabloid scanner. My HP scanjet 8200 legal sized scanner wasn't cutting it (ignore the usb communication issues that made the scanner even more frustrating).

I trolled ebay for a while looking for tabloid/a3/11x17 scanners under a grand. Seems the options are:

A $200 mustek that uses a CCI rather than a CCD
A $1000 Microtek Pro scanmaker 9800xl
A $800 plustek A320

There are more expensive (and nicer) scanners out there, but all above the $1k range. The used ones on eBay never seemed to have a warranty and always seemed suspicious. Most of them also require a SCSI card/port, and are at least several years old.

Epson has some nice scanners in the "GT" series, as was posted earlier in this thread. The GT-15000 has good (but not SUPERAWESOMEOMFG) resolution, but remember that most cels were scanned for shows at like 60 dpi :)

The GT-15000 refurbished has free shipping

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/consumer/consDetail.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&oid=53728580

was on "clearance" and the price ($769) once I put it in my "shopping cart" was $653. The clearance deal seems to have ended, but I bet they bring it back.

USB communications rather than having to have a SCSI card was nice.

So I bought one. Seems to work ok, gotta start scannin' now.

Anyway, consider a refurb epson. You get a warranty and a real scanner from a real company.