hlison@bbn.com (Herb Lison) (07/27/88)
Has anyone on this board had experience with document scanners, that is,
optical scanners which product text and optionally digitized graphics.
I've heard about the Kurzweil scanners, and am interested in other
products, particularly one from a company called Pallentir (?). Any
leads/recommendations would be appreciated.
Herb Lison
[one of the more interesting commentaries on this technology can
be found in the latest issue of Verbum. Highly recommended (I'll
have to get subscription information from home, expect it in a day
or so). Essentially, the folks at Verbum have looked at scanners and
pointed out that glowing reviews in the hi-tech press
notwithstanding, the technology is:
o expensive
o even more expensive for output (cost to output a halftone on a
Linotronic can double, or even triple, the cost of the page)
o of marginal quality for publication purposes.
They also point out that for all the publications harping this
technology to DTP folks, none of the magazines use it -- because of
the problems mentioned above.... -- chuq]
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with a subject line of helpEllen_Sangster@mtsg.ubc.ca (07/29/88)
Over the past couple of months I have had a chance to work
with an Abaton 300 sheet-feed scanner and its associated image
processing software C-Scan (on the Macintosh). [As an aside, I
would recommend a flat-bed scanner over a sheet-feed model for
ease of use in obtaining straight scans, and scanning from books.]
C-Scan version 1.5 does not do gray scale scanning, only line art
and halftones. Version 1.6 does do gray scale scanning with 16 levels
of gray. Both versions allow you to do some image manipulation (like
painting, erasing, selecting areas, pasting transparently, etc.)
I did several kinds of scans and output them to both a NEC
Silentwriter (a Postscript laser printer) and a Linotron 100
typesetter. On the plain paper printer, only the line art scans
would be acceptable publication quality for books or magazines.
The photo scans may be acceptable for flyers or newsletters,
depending on your standards.
On the typesetter, gray scale scans were just acceptable for books.
Using software with more gray levels (e.g. 64) would produce
superior results, although the files would probably be much larger.
There was a good review of several scanners in the July 88
issue of MACazine, covering both the hardware and software.
I have several extra handouts left from a demo I gave a
couple of weeks ago (these are actual laser printer output from
scanned images imported into PageMaker ver. 2). If anyone wants
one, send your name and address either to:
Ellen Sangster
Computing Services
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C. CANADA V5A 1S6
or via BITNET, EARN or NetNorth electronic mail to
USERELLE@SFU
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with a subject line of helpnews@sun.uucp (news) (07/29/88)
We have evaluated a number of OCR/scanners (we resell such
things). My experience of the Palantir CDP (Compound Document
Processor) is that it works pretty well. We use it hooked up to the
Ethernet (it acts as a pretty dumb host), it can also connect RS232
or SCSI. Particularly neat is that the scanner and OCR guts are
seperate logical units, meaning that you can can without OCR or
down-load existing images for further OCR. Recognition rate is pretty
fair considering the range of input that it can cope with.
We have also evaluated a unit from AEG (Germany), which whilst
not a digitizer in the normal sense (it doesn't deliver images) does a
pretty good job of reading forms, including hand-print!
I can give you contacts if interested.
Martin Reed, Racal Imaging Systems Ltd
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