The last time I worked with paper the scanner we had in the studio was a Fujitsu fi-4750C which we used to scan drawings into ANIMO . The scanner was very fast and produced good quality scans (we scanned at 300 dpi) .
This scanner model seems to be discontinued now, but has been replaced by
Fujitsu fi-5750C . We did not use the flatbed part of the scanner, so we leased the Auto Document Feed attachment and just used that part of the scanner to scan our drawings. I don't know if it's possible with the Fujitsu fi-5750C to purchase or lease the ADF as a stand-alone item or if it comes attached to the flatbed part of the scanner.
The disadvantage of the high-speed Fujitsu scanners , like most scanners , is that they don't offer support for Macintosh , so the Twain drivers work best with a PC . We purchased a cheap Dell PC which was dedicated to the task of scanning and that's all we used it for . The Dell was on the same network with the Macs so we could just grab the folders of scanned images and drag them over to the Macs to work on.
Unfortunately, this doesn't answer your question about how it would work for scanning images directly into TVPaint. Hopefully someone from TVPaint support can step in here and discuss recommended scanners or scanner driver specifications . However, for speed I can recommend the high-end Fujitsu ADF scanners such as Fujitsu fi-4750C .
We scanned over 40,000 drawings with very little trouble. I think one time we had to call the Service Technician to come out to fix it , and it turned out to be something very simple to fix. The biggest thing to remember is to constantly clean the rollers or else the graphite dust which accumulates on the rollers (graphite from the drawings) will start to smear the new drawings as they go through the scanner rollers.
We also had an
Epson 10000-XL Graphic Arts flatbed scanner , which is an excellent scanner and fairly fast as flatbed scanners go ... but as it turned out was too slow for our production needs, so we moved to the Fujitsu which had a very fast Auto Document Feed . (we kept the Epson flatbed for scanning other artwork, mainly background paintings) There was an ADF attachment available from Epson for the 10000-XL , but I don't remember why we didn't get that and switched over to the Fujitsu ... ? It may have had something to do with the Fujitsu being better to use with ANIMO. Here is the link for the
Epson Auto Document Feeder attachment for the 10000-XL flatbed . All in all, I think Epson scanners are more Mac friendly. Again, I'd hope that someone from TVPaint could answer your question about the compatibility between Epson scanner drivers and TVPaint . The information on the Epson page for the 10000-XL shows that the
latest drivers are compatible with Mac OS 10.2.8 - 10.4 and Intel Mac OS 10.4.4 or later .
I found that the flatbed version of the Epson 10000-XL always produced very good quality scans and was very easy to use on the Mac platform , so perhaps with the addition of the ADF attachment it would be the best scanner for the job ?
)