mbutts@mntgfx.mentor.com (Mike Butts @ APD x1302) (05/11/89)
Lately several hand-held scanners for Mac have come out. They are
all about 4" wide and connect to the SCSI port. You drag one across
your page and a linear sensor reads off the pixels. MacConnection
offers one from ThunderScan, and MacFriends has something I think is
called ScanMan. These scanners are $300-$400.
I have several questions:
- Are they any good? How hard is it to get a reasonably well
registered image, that isn't skewed or ripply? I'm sure
it isn't professional quality, like a flatbed, but how about
for personal use?
- How are they at scanning text? Are the characters visually
recognizable? I am specifically thinking of using one as
a low-cost way to collect excerpts from books onto disk while
doing bibliographic research for history papers and the like.
I understand the characters will remain in graphic form, not
ascii.
- How large is the resulting image file, for something like text,
per square inch or whatever? I'll bet a scanner is a great
way to fill up disk space.
- How do they get vertical registration info? By little index
wheels on the bottom? How well do these little wheels track
on various kinds of paper?
- Can you get a decent scan out of a bound book?
- None of them will work with OCR software yet. Any thoughts
on the prospects? As OCR software is getting reasonably cheap,
the scanner is the big ticket item. How many students
and others would like personal OCR? Beats typing.
- There are several on the market. Pros/cons?
- PDX only: Does anyone know of a store in Portland or Seattle
which has one set up for demo? MacFriends does not.
Any info anyone would have on any of these questions would be
appreciated. Please followup or mail; if I get much mail I will
post a summary. Thanks!
--
Michael Butts, Research Engineer KC7IT 503-626-1302
Mentor Graphics Corp., 8500 SW Creekside Place, Beaverton, OR 97005
...!{sequent,tessi,apollo}!mntgfx!mbutts OR mbutts@pdx.MENTOR.COM
Opinions are my own, not necessarily those of Mentor Graphics Corp.