Hi Guys,

I'm working with one of my students, trying to get his scanner to work. The scanner is a Visioneer 4800 USB with the most recent drivers installed, and we're using Picasa in Windows XP SP2 to operate the scanner.

An example picture can be seen here:

ImageShack - Hosting :: imagesx3.jpg

As you can see, there is some strange zig-zagging banding in the picture. This one is relatively low quality, but the banding still appears at 300 DPI.

Anyone got any ideas what this might be? The scanner glass seems to be pretty clean.

Hi Jim,

Looking at that tells me that's it's most likely a problem with the heads of the scanner, or the bar that holds the heads in place maybe loose (result of vibration).

If it's the head's then it really isn't worth trying to replace the head, but replace the scanner. If it's the bar, with some scanners these can be tightend, with others, it's normally clipped into plastic grooves at the top and bottom of the scanner.

Thanks for that - and apologies for taking a while to get back to you. I opened up the scanner today and couldn't see a way of tighten the bar or the head. So I mentioned to my student that he could get a new all in one to replace his scanner and printer (his printer is old and crappy) and he mentioned that he had one upstairs - he didn't use it because the ink was so expensive! It turned out to be a pretty good bit of kit (Lexmark X83) and we found cheap ink on the net; so all was resolved in a roundabout kind of way. Thanks again - the help you guys offer to me and to my students is invaluable.

Any time Jim. Marked as Resolved.