I recently bought a scanner to do pencil tests on, and it’s working out nicely. So I thought I’d recommend it to anyone looking at animating on paper. You’ll likely be in the market for something similar someday.  I followed this guide, and set out looking for an Auto Document Feed scanner that could handle 12 Field paper (10.5” x 12.5”). This meant I had three criteria in my search: It had to be cheap because I’m a student, it had to have ADF so I could spend more time animating (learning), and it had to be Wide Format so I could fit the animation paper in it. To make a long story short, after searching the internet, and checking out every store in town, I settled on this:

brother-mfc-6490cw

This in the Brother MFC-6490. It matched all my criteria, most important of which was cost, only setting me back $250. That’s a steal considering the prices for these kinds of scanners used to be in the thousands of dollars range. Now I spend all day animating and studying this:

dvdboxsetAnd when I need to test my work, I just stack everything in the tray on top, and my pencil test is ready in a few minutes. I remember doing a tests with a camera back in film school, and how long that took. So much time was wasted that could have been used animating or learning something new. I hate wasting time, so I’m super happy with this purchase. I couldn’t find anything like this from HP, Epson, or Canon, so I think this is the only one on the market in that price range.

I’m super excited about posting some animation tests, but that will have to wait a bit. I feel I should get past the really basic boring stuff before I post anything. Plus I suck, which doesn’t motivate me to share my shiny terds.