Best sub-$100 scanner?

[Vrock]

I have a bunch of old 35mm prints I'd like to digitally archive. My current scanner is an old Canoscan 3200f that's not supported under Win 7x64, and it doesn't do such a hot job these days with photos. I would like to replace it, cheaply, with a decent scanner that will do a nice job with photo prints, and an acceptable job turning paperwork into .PDF files for archiving purposes. The abilty to scan transparencies such as slides and negatives isn't important.

I'm thinking this one suits my purposes:

Epson Perfection V30 Photo Scanner

It has good reviews on Amazon, and seems to be made for what I want to do. Particularly attractive to me is the software that allows you to scan multiple photos at once, but which automatically separates them and saves them as different files. This could cut the time I would spend scanning pictures by 600%.

Does anyone have any other suggestions, or any experience with this scanner? I've used both Mustek and Canon scanners in the past, but I'm out of the loop on anything made in the last decade. Thanks in advance.

[DiMaestro]

Do you want a negative film scanner, or general document scanner? From your post I'd assume film scanner. Real Film scanners are crazy in price .. but have crazy good results.

What's your primary purpose in the scanner? If documents, just about any old scanner that can output to TIF with a adobe acrobat backend is what you want. If you want mindless pdfs, then all of them can do that.

I just put in a http://www.shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-o ... ed-Scanner for one of the guys at work, and it does a pretty good job. It's not photorealistic, but does a decent scan to word doc (OCR) and really does a good two sided PDF scan. He's happy. But, for images? I don't think I'd do it. It's also about 3x what you want to pay. ... If you want crazy check out fujitsu http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/comp ... 6130z.html ... but they are like 1,500.

What would you put on a higher priority, negatives or documents?

Also, have you tried the vista 64bit drivers (if you're running a 64bit os?) ... the 64 bit drivers haven't really changed from Vista to Win7. The 32bit ones? Doesn't matter, they offer Win7 32bit drivers for that scanner at: http://software.canon-europe.com/softwa ... asp?model= ... However I don't place a lot of hope for Canon to support anything older than 3 year old hardware for Win7 64bit. Just got burned on a Image Copier/Scanner MF4150 after 3 years of usage going from XP to Server 08R2.

Personal Note; My MFP printer is a HP MFP1212NF - printer, copier, fax, scanner. The scan function on the lower end HPs *sucK* ... while the produce decent results, it's at least a minute or two per page. They'll put out decent results, but .. OMG they are slow. I wouldn't buy any sub 300 HP product again. A Brother? Probably yea. No HP less than 400 tho.