Scanning versus Photographing Art

This year I have helped coordinate a group of watercolour artist (the "Wednesday Wanders" to continue painting, together on-line rather than physically en-plein air during our extended lock down. It wasn't the same but it was fun and we have been asked to submit some of our works for publication. I have long suspected that for watercolours at least photogrphy was better, particularly for luminosity of colour in the more delicate watercolour washes.

.VS.  

So this was an opportunity to do a reasonable "authentic"* comparisons. I have a "cheap" oldish HP Photosmart ink-jet printer, with a built in Scanner on top. I assume this is the style most home-based printers will be. It has served me well (mainly to scan sketches for cartooning but also worked for  documents, printed matter etc). It's proved  more than adequate but I don't want to claim its perfect. On the other hand I'm using my older olympus on a Copy Stand I made long ago using an old enlarger base. 

Lifting the lid of the scanner, positioning the painting and starting the appropriate software actually took me two minutes! The scan took a further 35 seconds and a slight delay before it was saved (or a longer delay if I changed the name of the file being saved). changing the painting to a new one was only around a minute and another 25 seconds so a minute round trip. By comparison the copy stand took about 3 minutes to find and attach the camera. However aligning the painting and taking the pictures was less than 5 seconds and I could change over painting and photograph each with that 5 seconds.

* I know you can do a pseudo-test that can prove almost anything on social media. You Tube) is full of half baked and conflicting views so I figure it is important to not add to the confusion. I'll let you check for which capure you like best (I like the photos) but I trust what I have written here is easy to follow and you can test out each step yourself, So please go and do some similar testing convince yourself.