So I've got a Canon MP560 scanner/copier/printer, which is a nice machine in most ways... but it's got this little problem when it comes to white backgrounds.

See, I'm pretty sure its designers had photos and financial documents in mind rather than drawings. Indeed, when you go to scan something, you have to choose either "photo" or "document." If you choose "document," it'll scan the whole picture, nice and complete, but it'll be kind of crappy quality. It's when you choose "photo," the high-quality setting, that really weird stuff starts happening.

Like, if it's a single contiguous drawing on a white background, it will be automatically cropped to the outermost edges of color, so the drawing always touches the sides of the image. If it's a drawing with two or more parts, separated by areas of white, it scans them as separate images and they'll show up as separate jpegs on the computer. It's like this scanner is saying, "Okay, I know that you must have put twelve photos down there, because there's space between twelve little areas of color I can read. So I'm going to save them as twelve photos and there's NOTHING you can do to stop me." It completely ignores my screams of, "Those are twelve stages in a friggin transformation sequence, you goddam uppity piece of junk!" It knows just enough to think it is smarter than me.

I would rather have a plain stupid scanner that scanned all 8.5x11" of what I put down on it, no matter what, but I guess those aren't made. I would use the "document" setting, except it reduces the quality to below my standards. So I've been falling back on the only reliable solution: color in every background.

And it's actually been looking pretty nice. Maybe the sneaky lil machine is secretly trying to improve my art.