Why are my scans different sizes?

barriejohn69

Please bear with me on this as I'm not the best.

On my old laptop I can scan a document and save as a pdf and it'll be say 300kb. If I scan the same document on the same printer to my new laptop using the same options its 5mb.

I think I use cutepdf on both but the old laptop does come up with something like uyy reader when it is saving.

Any help appreciated as it is a pain in the neck having to dig out the old laptop to scan and email.

Thanks

debitcardmayhem

Sorry , but how can you scan with a printer? What is the version of windows on each Laptop, and more to the point which scanner and which software, 5 Mb is not a huge file, but of course unless you tell us which software you are using and what settings you use for the scanner e.g. 300dpi vs 600 dpi, grayscale vs colour we are guessing I am afraid:o

johnmc

It'll be an all-in-one with a flat bed scanner.

barriejohn69 you need to check what program you are using on each machine and what the settings are, please.

barriejohn69

Its a lexmark 5200 and I just scan with the lexmark all in one app. Old laptop is xp and new one windows 7. Both are acer if that helps

barriejohn69

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Sorry , but how can you scan with a printer? What is the version of windows on each Laptop, and more to the point which scanner and which software, 5 Mb is not a huge file, but of course unless you tell us which software you are using and what settings you use for the scanner e.g. 300dpi vs 600 dpi, grayscale vs colour we are guessing I am afraid:o

Given that most printers scan these days there is no need for sarcasm. Its a lexmark 5200 PRINTER. As I said it is using cutepdf to makethe pdfs. It is scanning to file so does not ask for the options you are mentioning. I would have hoped the plea for transparency at the start of my post would have answered these but alas.

prowla

The dpi setting (dots per inch) radically affects the scanned document size, as does the amount of whitespace on the doc being scanned (lots of white can be highly compressed), and also whether you are choosing black & white or phot quality.

The way the scanned file is saved will also be relevant - a bitmap (.BMP) will be way larger than a compressed (.JPEG) file.

In the end, look at the result and decide if it loogs good enough quality.

debitcardmayhem

barriejohn69 wrote: »

Its a lexmark 5200 and I just scan with the lexmark all in one app. Old laptop is xp and new one windows 7. Both are acer if that helps

Check that the settings on each are the same first , it may be that the version on XP is using different defaults compared to Windows 7. Also check that the settings on Cutepdf are the same on each. I guess that the Lexmark software doesn't allow you to output direct to PDF, I know that the Canon scanner software does.

Mr_Toad

barriejohn69 wrote: »

Please bear with me on this as I'm not the best.

On my old laptop I can scan a document and save as a pdf and it'll be say 300kb. If I scan the same document on the same printer to my new laptop using the same options its 5mb.

I think I use cutepdf on both but the old laptop does come up with something like uyy reader when it is saving.

Any help appreciated as it is a pain in the neck having to dig out the old laptop to scan and email.

Thanks

I had a similar problem.

It wasn't the scanner that was causing the problem it was the save file dialog.

One machine asked me what quality/size I wanted the saved file to be. there was a slider for best quality - large file or lower quality - smaller file. Handy if you want to email the document.

On the other machine I didn't get this option, I scanned the document and the file was saved automatically at the highest quality which meant that the file was massive. In the end I had to use another program to open the file and save it at a lower quality.

paddyrg

Probably uncompressed vs JPEG compression or similar - check every single 'advanced' setting and you'll find it buried deep somewhere