scanner quality when profiling?

[John Burch <john2004@bga.com>]

<x-flowed>Hi,
I've been struggling with wizi to produce profiles for my 1200 using 
Generations Ink. Since the first profile did not work I figured I would 
have to tweek it using Chris Bair's tut at 
http://www.tssphoto.com/sp/dg/tips/profiles.html

But the problem may be my scanner. A cheap UMAX Astra 1220U with all the 
auto adjustments turned off and set to 150 dpi.

To test the scanner, I put the wizi target photo inside and scanned it. 
Then in Photoshop I went around reading the colors in the picture and they 
don't look good.

The main problem is that even in a gray scale block, where the color is 
constant on the photo, the software shows noisy colors that vary in RGB by 
up to 20 units of difference between green and blue in the same color 
square at the mid point of the  gray scale.  In other words, the colors 
coming into the software from the scanner are so messed up that wiziWYG 
probably can not make good decisions at all.

The black end of the gray scale is 36, 0, 42  and varies all over the place 
up to 33, 20, 39.
The white end is 242, 238, 251 and varies also.

So, is this normal? Or is this scanner acting the way most scanners 
act?  What does someone else see with the wizi target?

I was hoping to use the scanner as a comparative color meter. My color 
sense if poor and if the scanner were accurate, I could use the numbers to 
tweek the profiles. But if the scanner can't measure the color of a known 
target, I can't trust it to tell me how much I've changed things. By 
scanning the old print with the new print, I expected to get comparative 
changes.

Comments?
John 
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