most scanners will be able to pick up the pencil. it's the post-scanning work that'll really clean it up and make it look ok.

with pencil drawings, tweaking the file in photoshop will really make an enormous difference in terms of clarity and even the quality of line that is shown. it really is a matter of tweaking the settings and finding what works best for the specific drawings.

the difference between a $80 scanner and a $300 scanner isn't gonna make a big difference in terms of quality (for basic pencil drawings). i used a cheap LED scanner by canon in school for my portfolio and it worked fine.

if you want to really capture exactly what you have on paper, maybe getting them photographed would even be a better choice. good lighting and some tungsten film will do the job.

any old cheap scanner will do.

scanning drawings actually works better than photos/slides.
if you scan at 100%, your image quality is superior to a 35mm slide (which you scan & blow up) you'll waste time grey-carding, bracketing, and developing.

you may have to piece together big drawings. but portfolio size is usu. not bigger than 15 x 11" so your images will shrink down and look great.

i'd scan it with any old scanner at 300dpi in its full size and then tweak the colors and line weights in photoshop so that the pencil sketch quality really shines through. Adjust the dpi if you plan on blowing it up.

levels adjustments are your friend in photoshop.

for the scanner itself, look at the bezel around the glass plate: if it is too thick or stands up off the surface too far, then it is hard to get drawings larger than a4 onto the glass without creasing them or blurring them at the edges.

also, look for how the lid is attached. sometimes the lid gets in the way if you are scanning large sheets piecemeal or from books (eg sketchbooks). removable lids are available.

300dpi is plenty. don't believe the 4800dpi numbers. they just scan at 600 or 1200 and then interpolate the rest in software, which is completely useless. 600dpi is fine for print quality, unless you want to enlarge the drawings.

agfa, agreed. 300 is good enough quality, most printers print at 300 anyway, some professional printers even print at 200...

The cheap canon scanner that came free with a desktop 6 years ago works fine for me...

Much obliged.

what about large format scanning? any good places in the l.a. area that can handle 36" drawings?

our office uses Blair. It's sort of expensive, but they usually (i stress USUALLY) do a good job. I've had a mix of experiences with them.

Sometimes they do an amazing job. They show me the proof and it's perfect. Othertimes, I've had to sit there and color correct for hours with them.

This is Blair Graphics in Santa Monica by the way. i know they have another shop elsewhere in town as well

oh yeah, unless you save images on a CD/Tape, for archiving purposes, save all files in TIFF format.

JPEGs degrade each time you open & close them so you lose quality. a graphic designer told me.

Merely for tiling purposes (since you have over-sized images), HP has a tileable scanner the HP scanjet 4670 that we have at the office for such purposes. It is very cheap (sub $100), but you will need to do some photoshop work to drop out the noise, otherwise it gets the job done.

anotherquestion:

not quite true. jpg is lossy compression, so each time it is compressed you lose data. if you open a jpg and then re-save as jpg you are compressing it again by throwing out more image data. just opening and closing jpgs wont make them worse, but re-compressing them will. tiffs by contrast use non-lossy compression, so it makes the images smaller without losing any data

agfa, yeah, you're right.. i was over-simplifying. i guess my main idea was that for archiving purposes, it's a good idea to have a tiff file.

Just found this thread as I have been looking for some similar advice recently.

I want to scan some pencil drawings which have tone and shading on them (perspective drawings). Every time I use a conventional scanner though it picks up the paper itself as a grey and when I adjust the levels in Photoshop (to whiten the paper) it leaves the lines but no shading. Also the edges of the page scan as dark shadows and the centre as if it is lit. The drawings are very delicate and the pencil is more light grey than black so maybe I am expecting too much?

Any advice?

:d