They truly are. And for some reason they don't seem to get much better either. Other consumer electronics improve, yet after that initial burst that made them affordable they got stuck, still distort color, still large ones are really expensive, still don't flatten slightly warped things well, still don't cope well with the light that comes from the side through cracks when you scan things like book pages... I mean, my current scanner is not any better than the first one I had bought, an I would have just kept with that one if the SCSI connection wasn't so uncommon now.