One thing is that it depends on what sort of scanning you want to do. If it's images, photos, that sort of thing, you really want a scanner optimised for the job. If it's documents, like printed paper, bills, etc, it's really a different animal entirely.

For photos, I can certainly recommend the Epson V700 photo scanner. I have one of these, and the image quality is fantastic, both for reflective and transmissive media. The only thing I have seen that is better is a dedicated film scanner such as the Nikon ones, and they're several thousand dollars more. It's also very fast, as it has a firewire interface. At lower resolutions it's really very quick indeed, and higher resolutions it produces amazingly detailed output. It may be outside your budget, but the lower spec ones such as the V500 office or V500 photo scanner might be more suitable. I don't have personal experience of these models.

For documents I can recommend one of the Fujitsu Scansnap scanners. I picked up the predecessor to this one from ebay, brand new, for about £120, or perhaps $190 in US monies. It has a reliable document feeder, and duplex scans pages at high resolution in about 10 seconds per page. If you wind the resolution down a bit it will feed a page through in less than half that. The output is an indexable PDF file.

The unit is also quite small and light, and very portable. I believe the newer model is somewhat quicker.

The V500 office might also be worth looking at for document scanning, as it also has ADF.

pca