At 02:42 PM 11/12/98 -0500, you wrote:
>The institution that I work for is interested in purchasing a color scanner
>which can faithfully
>reproduce color images from paper artifacts.(etc)

Often a new piece of hardware gives you ideas you didn't have before you
bought it, and sometimes it's not up to the new demand.  Example: no
flatbed scanner even with an adapter can do a good job with 35mm slides,
because you need very high absolute resolution for these teeny images.  On
the other hand, a slide scanner, which also scans negatives nicely, gives
you all sorts of capabilities that can avoid a darkroom for many purposes,
especially if you have a good photo inkjet printer (which have gotten quite
cheap). Unfortunately, no single machine will do both, so don't expect your
flatbed to do slides even if it has a transparency adapter.