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How to choose a scanner

What kind of scanner you buy depends on what kind of scanning you do. We at Computer Friends used to offer hand scanners but due to the falling prices of sheet-fed and flat-bed scanners we no longer feel these scanners are cost-effective.

For more cost effective scans, and especially for optical character recognition (OCR) text reading, flatbed scanners are worth the extra dollars. Many offer optional or standard sheet feeders for hands-off input of OCR pages. A few like the Artiscan with the optional X-Ray/Transparencie adapter can scan 35mm slides or transparencies as well as paper goods.

Most scanners offer a choice of resolutions. Higher resolution (more dots per inch) means sharper images and allows OCR reading of text in smaller point sizes. Another note on resolution: Be sure to compare different models’ true or optical resolution, not the effective resolution achieved via interpolation (an image-smoothing software technique that adds extra dots or pixels between those in the original scan).

For some desktop publishing jobs, and especially if you don’t have a color printer you don’t absolutely need a color scanner. A less expensive black-and-white scanner can handle simple line art or OCR, while popular gray-scale units (offering up to 256 shades of gray) produce images comparable in quality to newspaper photos. However who uses monochrome in a Super VGA world?

Color is not always more expensive and can be quite useful under some circumstances. The price of color printers is steadily falling (last check on the Fargo Primera, a thermal wax printer, was around $599.00) and it would be unfortunate to purchase a grayscale scanner only to find that 3 months from now you need a color photograph scanned.

Today 30-bit, true-color scanners that "see" up to 1.07 billion colors are increasingly affordable, and essential if you use a color printer or want to insert scanned images into presentations.

Bundled software image editing programs and an OCR package is an important part of your scanner purchase. Look for (almost always) Windows based software that offers image cropping, rotating, contrast, brightness, and image editing. Riding the TWAIN

It’s not that we don’t already have enough computer terms and capitalized words to remember, but the scanner standard TWAIN is particularly insidious: It’s not even an acronym. While its developers first thought of calling their new protocol CLASP (Connecting Link for Applications and Source Peripherals), the name TWAIN doesn’t stand for anything beyond linking two things; imaging products and application software.

TWAIN is an application programming interface (APl) jointly developed by Aldus, Caere, Eastman Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, and Logitech for the purpose of letting programs directly capture images from any TWAIN compliant source, whether it be a scanner, a digital still camera such as Canons RC-360, or even a video frame grabber like the ColorSnap PC.

In effect, TWAIN turns any application into a scanning program. For hardware and software manufacturers, TWAIN means freedom from multiple device drivers and proprietary interfaces: a single standard, instead of countless driver combinations for different input devices and image editors, desktop publishers, or scanning or OCR packages. For user’s, TWAIN means built in access to images or OCR text from within any TWAIN compliant application.

A word processor with TWAIN capability can activate any TWAIN scanner to scan and process characters, then import them directly into a document. The same goes for a TWAIN desktop publishing program, which can bring an image onto a page with no assistance from a separate image-processing package.

TWAIN should eliminate some of the perennial confusion and concern regarding device drivers. If you know that your scanner speaks TWAIN, you can rest assured that your new TWAIN compliant image-editing (PhotoStyler or PhotoShop)and OCR (Wordscan or Recognita) software will work with it right off the bat.

An increasing number of scanners support TWAIN. Software support is growing, too, with virtually every image editing package either including or promising an upgrade that will support the standard.

Other vendors, ranging from Canon and Intel to WordPerfect and Micrografx, are, so to speak. climbing aboard the TWAIN. It looks like this non-acronym is here to stay.

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