I got a better scanner, here's the difference:

In the menu you'll find my scanning guide and from it you'll see there's a link to a more in-depth scanning guide. It links to a community written guide for Gaming Alexandria. They scan some stuff for the Video Game History Foundation. Anyway, my little Canon Lide 300 was great, but it maxes out at 1200dpi and so it starts showing small remnants of compression artifacts at that level. Really wasn't the end of the world but considering I want these scans to be the final time anyone has to rip apart these books, I want to really go bananas with doing it right. 

Got this guy based on the recommendations of that group, which doesn't break the bank but isn't cheap either. Epson Perfection V600 is for sale for about $250. The Canon Lide 300, which I still do like way more than the similarly priced Epson V19, is around $110, (if you can find it, it's also an older machine.)

It makes sense there would be a quality difference, the higher end Epson is deep. It has room for better equipment, it goes up to something like 9400dpi- for god knows what reason. Reading molecular structure? To flex? It kind of sucks if you have a small space like I do, because the scanning bed isn't any bigger than my little Canon, but whatever, I just have to keep my desk more free of clutter. Here's the size comparison:

But, more importantly, here's the image comparison. This is at 1200dpi and zoomed in at 600% and all adjustment features have been turned off for these with both scanners. I do all my adjustments post in photoshop (Please keep in mind Blogger may add some compression too, this is just a rough example)

Left, Canon Lide 300, $110. Right Epson V600 $250. No adjustments and zoomed to 600%

Same image as the comparison above with un-adjusted colors from Canon Lide 300

Same image as the comparison above with un-adjusted colors from Epson V600

Here's an image, for no real reason, (it was my first test image so I just have it sitting here) showing the different scan sizes, It was done with the Epson V600 if you're curious.

Thanks for coming to my nerd talk

EDIT: If you're in default profesional mode, like you don't have presets you're importing or calibrating yourself, then every time you do a new preview in professional mode you have to hit the reset button to turn the color correction off. (You don't have to do a new preview with each scan so it's honestly not a big deal, but I mention it because it will catch you off guard.) You can see the change in that icon on the left: You don't want the arrows touching the sphere. Look at the pink post-it note to see how much that auto correct burns the image.