What do you use for scanning on the Mac?

The basic HP driver is OK for printing, but hopeless for scanning. I think they let you scan to JPEG and that's about it. I purchased VueScan for Mac OSX and I love the features, but it's very unstable. On large multi-page documents, it will often crash while processing. Thank god for doc feeders, but still it's frustrating when I've fed a 30 page document through only to have the app crash and make me start over. Is there anything better out there?

I have a Canon LIDE scanner and I just use the utility that it came with.

I used to use some Canon software with my Canon Lide, but these days Preview.app does all I need. I don't do a whole lot of scanning, though, so take that with a grain of salt.

Preview does scanning? I'm trying to get old documents online so I can dump my paper files, so I need to be able to scan to PDF and OCR is nice too in case I ever want to search for something. Can the Canon utility do that? Maybe it's time to change my printer.

Yep, Preview has gained a LOT of features over the years, including scanning, importing images from cameras, and modifying PDFs. Preview can save a random image file to PDF, so I think it should be able to do that with a freshly scanned one, too. No OCR, though (and I've never looked for OCR features in the Canon software, so I don't know about that).

The software that came with my Canon LiDE 210 (Canon MP Navigator EX) has OCR, but I've never used it, so I can't say how good it is (or not).

I have an HP Officejet 4500, and I find the scan capabilities to be fantastic. My standard process is to put multiple pages into the sheet feeder, choose "scan to PDF" and then the Mac that I want it to go to, and a short while later I get a double-layered PDF document on my computer (the top layer is the image scanned, while the layer beneath it is the OCR version of the document (and the OCR is good 95% of the time).

(Disclaimer - I am assuming that the document is double-layered, but there may be some other way of doing the same effect)

That's weird. I'm using similar HP Officejet, and that wasn't my experience at all. It's possibly a year or two older than yours, but I don't see that making a big difference. I guess I need to revisit the issue.