I recently obtained a new scanner after my old one finally died about a year back. Being, well, not made ten years ago, it gives a significantly better image than the old one. Compare this with this, or this with this. My question is: is this enough of an improvement to warrant rescanning everything that I still have?

Also, anyone have any suggestions for getting rid of the print-matrix artifacts? They mostly go away when you shrink the image, but it still bugs me, and if there's a way to get rid of it, I'd love to know.

I probably won't bother rescanning any discs, though. This scanner tends to turn them into disco balls.

I wouldn't bother at your place. New scans are better, but only because of different software settings and descreen. Same result could be achieved with basic photo editing software.


It's called the moiré pattern, which is caused by printing method. Here's some theory and advice for reducing the effect. Scanner software usually provide an option called "descreen", and Photoshop has same plugin.

Oh, and for discs that thread should be helpful.

I had the same impression as Klaster_1. The former scans look as if the scanner wasn't properly calibrated (color saturation etc.)?

More that the scanner was so old it didn't have any such calibration options. There's also that blurry stripe going down the middle of virtually every scan I've ever done, and the speckles in the black areas -- cleaning the glass never helped with those, so I have no idea what was causing them.


Thanks for the links! I'll see if I can get any better results from my next batch of scans. The downsampling Moby does for display mostly eliminates the effect, but it's still visible on a few of my recent scans.

I scan all my covers at 600 DPI, but after being uploaded to MG, I compared some on the site to the ones on my HDD, and it looks like they've lost some resolution.

After cover upload, it gets downsampled into small and large versions. Of course, original still remains, but could be accessed from direct link.