Epsom V700 Scanner

Posted on March 3, 2010 by TechSupport

Dual Lens System

The Epson Perfection V700 Photo scanner benefits from a Dual Lens system; the first lens is a 4800dpi affair and is used for all the reflective scanning and large format film up to 10×8. The second lens boasts an optical resolution of 6400dpi and is used for high quality film scanning. In our test the lens performed at its best in the 3200 – 4800 dpi range. The 6400dpi setting generated large files and didn’t offer much advantage in terms of image quality. The lenses are automatically switched when you select the document type in EpsonScan.

Film Holding Options

The scanner is supplied with five film holders; 12 mounted 35mm slides, four strips of six-exposure 35mm film, two strips of 120 film (6 x 20cm), two sheets of 5×4 and a film area guide for 10×8 or other film sizes. Generally the build quality of the film holders is very good, as this scanner is aimed at the semi-professional user. We would have liked a sturdier construction though. A new feature is a set of Film Height adjusters, these are small feet fitted on the reverse side of each holder. There are three settings; 2.5mm, 3mm and 3.5mm, which sets the height of the holders above the lens, or a crude zone focusing system. There was a marked difference in scan sharpness at each height. For 35mm slides we found the best setting to be 3.5mm (3mm is the default).

Bundled Software

The scanner is supplied with a good selection of software including; Adobe Photoshop Elements (Mac & Win), SilverFast SE, EpsonScan, Abbyy Fine Reader (OCR software) and a selection of other small Epson applications. Given that this scanner is aimed at the semi-professional, we’re surprised that Elements is included. The Epson V700 scanner produces superb quality scans with accurate colours. As with most scanners the scanned image will benefit from a generous dose of USM in an imaging application.

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Veho USB Negative Scanner

Posted on March 3, 2010 by TechSupport

Most people have an old pile of negatives lying around from the heady days of film-based cameras. Some may even have the job of getting some duplicates made or turning them into photos, way down on their to-do list.

Unless you have a dedicated photo printer with a suitable tray, it’s the kind of thing that’s awkward enough to remain on the ‘do it another day’ list, so this USB film scanner from Veho would appear to be the ideal solution.

It’s reasonably compact and is capable of scanning at the equivalent of 5-megapixels in quality, or 2,592 x 1,680 pixels in image size.

As the name suggests it plugs straight into your USB port and, after installing the software and drivers provided, is ready to use. Two slide holders are supplied for positives and negatives and these must be fed into the slot in the scanner manually, which was a slight disappointment, though in truth the often haphazard nature of negatives does mean that you’ll probably appreciate the ability to adjust position slightly to get the best fit.

ArcSoft PhotoImpression will help you grab the pictures using the dedicated capture tool accessible from the main interface. Here you’ll find a 12-slot virtual reel onto which photos are placed when they are captured, so you can take up to 12 at once by moving the slide holder through between each one, before saving them all to disk. There’s a nice degree of control over the capture quality and you can choose either JPG or TIF formats to save your images.

Once this is done you can edit photos and create slideshows through the ArcSoft application, as well as applying a range of effects to jazz things up.

Photo editing is something we’d certainly recommend, as although pictures are sharp and of good quality, we noticed that colours appeared rather washed out when compared to the developed original. There’s an auto-enhance tool here and other typical editing features such as red-eye removal, crop, straighten and colour enhancement.

There are also photo retouching tools which may well be necessary to remove artefacts from the image that carry through from the negative. Because these are quite common, it’s recommended that you clean the film as well as possible before scanning, and Veho provides you with a soft cotton swab for just this purpose.

The film scanner is certainly fast and convenient, but don’t expect great results instantly. You’ll have to take quite a bit of care with the scanning process and would benefit from being a dab-hand at photo editing if you’re expecting results comparable to printed images and today’s digital cameras. For an easy way to digitise negatives and slides, though, it’s a tidy solution that’s pretty capable at what it does.

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Review of the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500

Posted on February 27, 2010 by TechSupport

If you’re someone who’s interested in digitizing and archiving all your paper receipts and financial and legal documents–or just about anything you have on paper–there are a handful of consumer sheet-fed scanners to choose from, including Fujitsu’s ScanSnap S1500.

What makes the S1500 so appealing is that it’s not only compact (about the size of a loaf of bread), but also very fast. This 600×600 dpi color scanner is designed to do one main thing and do it well. It scans documents–both color and black-and white–and instantly turns them into searchable PDF files (if you opt to make them searchable).

According to Fujitsu, the S1500 can scan at a rate of 20 pages per minute. In our tests, that proved to be accurate as we scanned a 350-page manuscript in about 16 minutes. It’s also able to scan both single-sided and doubled-sided documents.

As with most of these consumer document scanners, setting up the scanner is very simple. You install the ScanSnap software on your Windows or Mac computer, connect the S1500 via a USB cable, and you’re ready to start scanning. Slip some documents into the top-loading tray and then press the button on the front of the unit (it’s the only button) and the desktop software automatically launches. You can choose to scan to ScanSnap Manger or another compatible document organizer.

If you’re loading a several pages, you have to be a little careful to put all the pages in straight and not add too many pages at one time (you’re supposed to load only up to 50 pages at once). With that 350-page manuscript and an almost 1,000-page legal deposition, we had pretty good luck loading about 40 pages to start out, then adding pages as the stack got lower. We had a few paper jams, but the ScanSnap software does a good job letting you continue where you left off (before the jam) without messing up the whole scan. You pop open the scanner, pull any jammed pages out, close the scanner, and hit the button to begin scanning again. The software tells you which page wasn’t scanned properly and you can start from there.

Once you scan your document or receipt, it appears as a PDF file in the application. You then rename the file and decide whether to put it in a folder with other documents or receipts. We can’t say the software’s superslick, but it is easy to use, and it’s easy to drag and drop PDF files wherever you want them to go.

The Windows version of the ScanSnap manager comes with some extras, the most important of which is optical character recognition software that lets you turn scanned PDF documents into Word or Excel files. For example, we took an old manuscript that we didn’t have stored on disc, digitized it into a PDF, then fed that PDF into the included ABBYY OCR program (it’s not the latest 10.0 version of ABBYY’s FineReader, but it is version 9.0). Windows users also get business-card reader software that lets you feed business cards into the scanner and turn them into digital contacts (it works well except when a card has odd lettering or characters on it).

Overall, we were pretty pleased with the results of the ABBYY software, though we did encounter one glitch where it turned all “I”s into “1″s. You can do a find and replace if the software makes any errors like his, but things get a little tricky when you’re faced with a situation where you have both “I”s and “1″s throughout a document.

While we found the S1500 a pleasure to use and easy to store (the paper trays fold inward into the unit to conserve space when not in use), we should point out that it does have some limitations. For starters, it can’t accept oversized documents aside from longer legal-size pages. Since the scanner is designed for 8.5×11 inch paper (as well as the aforementioned legal-size paper), anything wider than 8.5 inches isn’t scannable. Also, while it can scan photos, it doesn’t scan them as well as a true photo scanner (we ended up with some visible scan lines with an 8×10 photo we scanned in) and it turns them into PDFs not JPEG images. On the other hand, we were impressed how most everything else looked, including receipts that were reproduced in vivid detail.

Also, as noted, Mac users don’t get the important OCR extras; the scanner simply turns documents into PDF files and the desktop software helps you organize those files. (Initially, the S1500 was not compatible with Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X, but Fujitsu has recently provided new drivers.)

For those looking for something even smaller and more portable, Fujitsu also makes the S300M, which costs about $250. However, the S300M is geared toward receipts and short documents.

For about $400 online, the S1500 isn’t cheap, but it’s reasonably priced for what it does and how well it performs. The fact is, if you’re looking to get out from under all the paper that’s overwhelming you–or just taking up space–the Fujitsu S1500 is a small but powerful organizational weapon that you’ll soon find indispensable.

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How to Choose a 35mm Slide Scanner

Posted on November 25, 2009 by TechSupport

 

Practical help for choosing a 35mm slide scanner with lists of 35mm film scanners: Polaroid SprintScan 4000, Nikon CoolScan, Minolta, Microtek, Olympus, (35mm slide scanner) manufacturers, makes, models including scanners with Digital ICE.

For desktop publishing we do not recommend any 35mm slide scanner below 2700 dpi, thus models at lower dpi are not included in our list of 35mm film scanners when a manufacturer has other models at the standard 2700 dpi.

Picture at left: Nikon CoolScan of 35mm slide, mushroom photographed in Peten, Guatemala, Leica R3, Kodachrome film.

The Leaf 35mm slide scanner was discontinued many years ago. Avoid the Leaf Lumina scanner; you do not want the poorly designed and vastly overpriced Lumina at all, not even at a discounted price.

“Software enhanced” dpi is not what you want. If the true optical dpi is 1950, that is all the actual dpi that will show true detail. The rest is wishful thinking.

The Nikon LS-4500 scans 35mm slides at 3000 dpi. This is a 3-pass scanner, which has always evoked comment. It scans 4×5 transparencies only at 1000 dpi, so you would be better off with a Linotype-Hell Saphir Ultra 2 which scans several 4×5 transparencies at a time each at 1200 dpi (especially if you place them in the scanner’s sweet spot, down the middle).

The Nikon LS-4500 is based on technology which is several years old, yet it still sells for $6,500. The Polaroid SprintScan 4000, at a reasonable $1995 is, despite its supposedly higher dpi, still not as good as the Nikon 2000 in the dark (shadow) portions of your image. For 4×5 size transparencies you get far superior price point with the Linotype-Hell Saphir Ultra2 (and LinoColor Elite is rated as a superior scanner color management software than what you get with a Nikon). An Imacon is in the high-end price range, but is a professional pre-press film scanning system that is also suitable for desktop publishing and in-house publishing. If you are a power user and prefer the best of the best, consider a Creo EverSmart flatbed scanner.

If you need good quality (professional quality) then you want to scan your 35mm slides either with an Imacon vertical scanner, a Creo EverSmart or a Fuji C-550 Lanovia flatbed scanner (true optical 5000 dpi). The Imacon has an advantage in that SilverFast scanner software is available. The learning curve for SilverFast is a lot softer than the software that is used for prepress. The Imacon, however, is not a drum scanner, a somewhat misleading designation simply because some Imacon models are upright in position, the same position as real drum scanners. But a true drum scanner uses PMT technology; all other scanners, including all Imacon models, use the more economical CCD technology.

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Fujitsu – ScanSnap S1500 review

Posted on November 24, 2009 by TechSupport

 

If you need to use a desktop scanner on a regular basis, you want it to be quick and easy to operate. It helps, too, if it’s small and able to convert scanned documents into a variety of formats, then save to disk or email/fax them to others. Fujitsu’s new ScanSnap S1500 meets most of those criteria and a few more besides.

Priced to appeal to the small business buyer, the ScanSnap S1500 is a lot smaller than you might expect as it’s sheet-fed rather than a flatbed device. It also folds up when not in use, with documents to be scanned loaded into a 50-page feeder that opens out of the top while a catch tray, similarly, folds out at the bottom. In between is a double-sided scanner, able to scan up to 20 pages (40 sides) per minute, with an ultrasonic detector to identify and alert the operator to any mis-feeds.

Installation takes around 20 minutes. A USB port and cable are provided for host connection, with Apple Mac and Windows versions available, both of which ship with a basic scanning application and tools to save the results in a variety of formats and print, fax or email the results. The Windows scanner we tried also came with a full copy of Adobe Acrobat 9 together with ABBYY FineReader for OCR conversion, plus a program to allow scanning direct to Microsoft SharePoint.

The only control on the scanner is a large, blue button. Load up your documents, press this button and they’re rapidly fed into the scanner and out again. Along the way the host software works how big each page is and which bits are in colour. It can also compensate for any misalignment before saving to PDF, optionally converting text to editable format as it goes.

Speed is dictated by the specification of the host PC but the whole process typically takes just a few seconds, after which you’re presented with a menu to, for example, send the scan to a network share, print it or send it out as an email attachment. Scanned documents can also be converted to Word, Excel or PowerPoint formats, plus you get a tool (CardMinder 4.0) to extract information from scanned business cards and manage the data involved.

It all worked as expected and we were impressed with both the speed and accuracy of the results. We also liked the intelligent cropping feature that enabled us to outline articles to be scanned using a highlighter rather scan the whole page every time, plus extract text from scanned areas and attach it to PDFs for indexing purposes.

Of course one of the drawbacks of a sheetfed scanner is the type and size of document it can handle. Books and magazines are a no-no, but the S1500 can cope with a variety of document sizes and weights other than A4. That includes both business cards and large documents up to A3, which need to be folded and placed inside a special carrier sheet. Unfortunately this last option wasn’t easy and if you need to scan large documents then a bigger, flatbed scanner would be a better choice.

Another drawback is the lack of TWAIN/ISIS drivers which means you can’t use the scanner with document management applications, other than Fujitsu’s own Rack2-Filer, a trial version of which is included in the box.

Such niggles aside, however, the ScanSnap S1500 is a fast little scanner that takes up hardly any room and will meet the needs of most small business buyers,. Moreover, it comes with a comprehensive software bundle to cope with a variety of tasks, and all at a very competitive price.

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