New Equipment!

My one-woman animation studio recently needed an upgrade in equipment.

This is the Epson Perfection 610 scanner that I purchased in Dec. 1999:

It has served me well from the last version of OS 9 through OS X Snow Leopard.

Right now, my animation method of choice is to draw on paper and then scan the drawings. A reliably functioning scanner is essential to my workflow. Unfortunately, Epson decided not to create a specific OS X Lion driver. I was able to get the scanner to work, but it did not allow me the same options it originally did (neither does the new scanner, but I'll get to that later.)

I weighed continuing with the old scanner but decided that Apple could come out with an upgrade to Lion that could potentially render the 610 completely unusable. Then I'd be in trouble.

I decided to replace Ole Reliable with something newer. After some research, I settled on the Epson Perfection V600 Photo:

Isn't she beautiful? It was affordable, scans slides, scans text and makes pdfs and is the more modern black instead of the old school beige. Me likey!

Just one complaint and it's more about my computer skills than the scanner itself: although the V600 has a TWAIN driver that allows me to scan straight into Toon Boom Animate Pro (although I can't rotate and clean up the drawings the way I'd like to), at this writing I'm only able to access the Epson scanner options via Animate Pro. So if I'm not scanning into Animate Pro, I can't access the Professional Options (TWAIN driver options) that allow me to, among other things, save my scanner settings. I said it's a matter of my computer skills because it's probably possible but I have yet to figure it out.

So if you need a new scanner, consider the Epson Perfection V600 Photo.

Tomorrow: some photos of test drawings from Scene 2.