MIKEA@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Michael Antolovich) (08/17/89)
Hi everybody, does anyone have experience with hand held type scanners
(4" wide strips etc). Are they any good, are the pieces of a page
easily lined up or is it just not worth it. What about cheap OCR
programs (are there any that work for a small price ?)
How are the small scanners powdered ? (want to use in US and
Australia, ie 240V 50Hz) Do they run off the Mac or a seperate power
cube ?
Thanks in advance,
Michael.garths%glass@Sun.COM (Garth Snyder) (08/18/89)
MIKEA@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Michael Antolovich) writes: > Hi everybody, does anyone have experience with hand held type scanners > (4" wide strips etc). Are they any good, are the pieces of a page > easily lined up or is it just not worth it. What about cheap OCR > programs (are there any that work for a small price ?) I don't know that much about them, but I have seen demo'ed and played with ThunderWare's LightningScan, and was extremely impressed. I'm planning to buy one of these at some point in the future (if the price comes down a little more) just for the spiffiness value. The complete system includes the hand scanner and a SCSI interface box into which it plugs. I don't know where the power comes from. Unfortunately, the interface box for the LightningScan is about the ugliest thing you have ever seen. It is an extruded metal case with plastic caps, kind of like a Hayes 1200 baud modem, only worse. The scanning unit itself is plastic, but it is beige plastic, not platinum. I asked the ThunderWare rep if it was available in platinum and he scoffed at me. I'm sorry, if this thing's going to live on my desk I want it to look nice, not like some creepy refugee from PC-land. The scanner will scan a strip about 4 inches wide, at resolutions of 100, 200, 300, and 400 dpi. Black and white only, no gray scales (but see below). It is easy to use and doesn't require you to have a superhumanly steady hand. There is a roller on the bottom that detects motion. The info coming in from the scanning bar is cross-referenced with the motion tracking, so you can go as fast or as slow as you like (within the limits of the data transfer rate to the computer), even stop and start with little distortion. There is a slit at the top of the scanner that lets you see through to the page you are scanning. Presumably this helps you get things lined up right, though I found it kind of strange to use since you don't actually see something in the window until you've already rolled over it. By not scanning exactly along a straight line, you can produce some wild effects that just can't be rivalled with a conventional scanner. Because of the motion tracking, you can be very subtle about this and produce results that don't look obviously distorted, yet don't match the original. You can move the scanner back and forth to produce a mirroring effect, too. Neat! The software supplied with the thing is the same software that ships with ThunderScan. Both a DA and an application are provided, but the functionality of the system is randomly distributed between the two. Some things you can only do from the DA, others only from the app. Almost like the two were developed by different teams. As a whole, the software has some outstanding abilities. It will take a black and white scan and collapse it into a (smaller) gray scale image. Works great! The neat thing about this is that you can then resize the gray scale image and halftone it back to black and white without making it look like a scaled bitmap. There is a transfer function control a la Image Studio that lets you map input gray levels to output levels, so you can posterize and re-contrast to your heart's content. Unfortunately, there is no control over halftoning. The halftone method used is the one that gives you results that look kind of like a mezzotint - I don't know what the name for this is. It does give nice results and is probably the way to go if you can only have one halftone screen. I haven't seen the Logitek ScanMan in real life, but I gather from photos that it uses same scanning hardware. I have seen the VideoWorks plug for it (which is a real treat in itself, by the way), and the software looks much less sophisticated. The ScanMan comes in platinum, and the interface box is sleeker and actually looks like a Mac peripheral. It is also about $50 cheaper ($350 vs $399 for the Lightning Scan). What I'd really like is the Logitek hardware with the ThunderWare software. I don't know if the interface boxes are compatible, and I doubt the two companies would cooperate to sell me this combination anyway. My current plan is to wait for the Lightning Scan to come out in slightly less repulsive clothes. As I say, my hands on experience with these scanners is limited. I'd love to hear from someone with more perspective. -------------------- Garth Snyder Sun Microsystems, mail drop 14-40 ARPA: garths@eng.sun.com 2550 Garcia Avenue ALSO: garth@boulder.colorado.edu Mountain View, CA 94043 --------------------