But I had had the impression that somehow there would be some reason the $5,000 scanners would cost so much -- what is it that they deliver to justify that cost, if you think a $500 unit is the unit of choice? That's the reason for a club, especially one that will ReBay when done, because a scanner bought for $5K and sold for $4,500 when done split among 10 people is very low cost, effectively putting us in a "price is no object" position in choosing the scanner (to a degree.) With a $500 scanner it's more tempting to keep the scanner when done for future stuff, though none of these scanners have linux drivers and I've trying to be rid of windows for regular use. The more expensive ones do seem to have much higher duty cycles if you want to scan all weekend.

I think people want a mix of uses. For old files and records, magazines, it's just access (and destruction.) For things truly needing preservation, they won't be thrown out at all, though they might be moved into storage boxes. They might still be scanned for access, and for distribution. (For example, if scanning the papers of a dead parent, one might make copies for the family.) Then there is a middle class, documents that will be discarded but for which bitmaps are not enough.

But one unit might not handle all this. A club might even consider getting two units, both to allow two people to scan and to handle different needs (business cards, photos and other colour items might do better on another scanner.)

A club would also purchase a professional paper cutter that can cut the spine off a magazine or book. Those are at least $200 to $300, so it's better when shared. For magazines grayscale is probably desired.

However, there is an argument that at today's disk prices -- 20 cents/gigabyte for hard disk and 5 cents/GB for dvd-rom -- there is no reason to throw away information at all. A full colour 300dpi scan of a page is only 22mb uncompressed, and would usually compress to quite a bit less even lossless, and even less in an appropriate lossy format. (If it has not been done already, I can imagine the design of a lossy format for scanning which works hard to preserve edges for OCR but is happy to throw away gradual shading and noise etc.)

Also, on your page you say the Kodak 2500D is the Panasonic S2055, not an S6 series -- which are you recommending? There sure are a lot of choices.