Take a scan man

OPERATION: Scanman

SECURITY STATUS: Top

FIELD STAFF: Single agent

MISSION: Domestic acquisition

TARGET: Family treasurer

REPORT:

It started two months before Christmas.

"Say honey, look at the great prices they have on flatbed scanners nowadays. Boy, wouldn't it be great to have one of those. Just think of all the stuff we could do - scan pictures to send to the family, do photocopies, produce graphics for my web site. Wow! The possibilities are limitless."

I mentioned something like that at least two times a week.

Then came the month before Christmas.

"Say honey, I just noticed how prices on scanners are dropping. Boy, it would be too bad to miss out on these bargains."

That was mentioned at least four times a week. Then came December. "Say honey, I was just wondering if you got my Christmas present yet. Oh, look. Here's some brochures on scanners."

Guess what I got for Christmas.

A lot of computer systems are being sold now with scanners. And often the purchaser of such a system has no idea what that big, flat oblong box can do.

"What's this," they might say.

And you might answer "A scanner is an array of photosensitive silicon cells that measure the light reflected off- or transmitted through-an original. Those measurements are then mapped onto levels (for example, 256 levels per primary color for a 24-bit scanner) by an analog-to-digital converter, and stored as binary digits that you can view and manipulate with your computer."

And at this point, they would hit you.

Actually, I copied that description from a web site which has received awards for being able to describe complex computer issues to the computer illiterate. Bill Gates must have been one of the judges.

You should have said, "A scanner takes a picture of stuff and stores that information so you can fiddle with it on your computer."

WHAT GOOD IS IT?

The first thing most people do with a scanner is digitize family photos.

It's great to be able e-mail photos of the family Christmas to Aunt Mathilda in Vancouver, but frankly, even Aunt Mathilda will eventually get sick of seeing you, which is probably why she moved to Vancouver in the first place. And after all, you could have just mailed her some copies of the pictures. (I have accepted no gratuities from Canada Post for that last comment)

But used in tandem with a printer, a scanner can also serve as a photocopier, which is actually a pretty handy little tool to have around the house, and for a small home-based business, absolutely essential. And equally important, the scanner can couple with your fax modem to serve as your fax machine. Although setting up a fax system with a scanner can be daunting to the digital neophyte, there are software packages like Win Fax Pro that can smooth out the operation.

With a good OCR (optical character recognition) program like Textbridge or Omnipage, a scanner can be used to digitize a document and then import that document into a word processor for changes. For businesses which spend a lot of time retyping documents for publication, this is a terrific boon.

But most importantly - and this is the reason for the entire scanner manufacturing industry - you can use a scanner to put your head on other peoples bodies.

TYPES OF SCANNERS

In the old days, hand-held scanners were about the only types available to the home computer user. Today, they are pretty-well extinct. The majority of scanners which ship with computer systems now are flatbed types, which look something like a photocopier.

Flatbed scanners are relatively compact, can scan a wide variety of sizes and shapes and are very convenient for scanning bulky objects like books. They all scan non-see-through material (reflective material). Some flat beds are capable of doing see-through material like transparencies, but you will probably have to buy a special attachment. If you are hoping to use a flatbed to scan film or slides, forget it. Although some manufacturers have little slide holders or other gizmos, they generally do not work, and if they do, the quality is terrible. I recently spent a whole weekend trying to get one device to produce a quality image from a slide. I should have just sent the slides to a photo shop for conversion to CD -ROM storage and spent the rest of the time watching TV. You need a film or negative scanner to properly digitize photos from slides or negatives.

Sheet-fed scanners are strictly for reflective material. They are compact and useful to someone who only wants to scan pages of documents.

LET'S GET TECHNICAL

Most of the scanners on the market use CCD (charged-coupled device) technology. Scanners in this family use a chip to capture and digitize picture information. The light carrying that information is transferred to the chip with a complex lens and mirror optical system. This machinery can sometimes get misaligned and the scanner housing also has to be relatively deep to hold all the optical mechanics.

More recently, CIS (contact image sensor) scanners have hit the market. With this technology, the complicated optical mechanism of the CCD system is replaced with a single row of sensors located only a couple of millimetres below the document. Illumination comes from a closely packed row of red, blue and green LEDs, which when mixed, create white light. This means that CIS scanners can be as thin as a laptop computer. Because they use LEDs for illumination, these scanners use far less power than their CCD siblings and can be powered from a battery for scanning-on-the-go.

Although CIS scanners might seem to be the best bet, the technology still needs a bit of work. As yet, CIS scanners are limited to resolutions of 300 to 600 dots-per-inch. The picture and colour quality of CIS scanners are also not up to CCD standards. So for business purposes, CCD scanners are the pick right now.

LET'S GET WAY MORE TECHNICAL

Scanners are also differentiated by the way in which they connect to the computer. Most scanners for the home market use a connection to the computer's parallel port - the place where your printer is connected. Some scanners can also make use of a Universal Serial Bus (USB) port, and therefore work a bit faster than their parallel port counterparts.

Scanner pros generally use SCSI port devices, (pronounced "scuzzi") which are faster and sturdy, but also more expensive and a nightmare for the general computer user to set up.

The parallel port is a nice solution for most PC systems. Every PC has a printer port. But it is slow, and requires a pass-through connector to allow you to keep connected to the printer. And if you have an external zip drive using the port right now, forget about it. Zip drives can't use the pass-through connector.

SCSI connectors can handle the high-bandwidth demands of professional graphics publishers. SCSI scanners usually ship with a SCSI connector, but your computer will need a SCSI card installed. And because the world works the way it does, most of the time the connector that ships with the scanner won't work with the card you have already installed in your computer.

Fortunately, many scanners also ship with their own SCSI card, adding to the overall price of the system. And hopefully, you will still have a place in your computer to stick the card.

SCSI is also a nightmare to install, maintain and troubleshoot if you don't know much about computers. Because of that, many in the industry think that SCSI systems are on the way out, to be replaced with USB systems.

USB is slightly slower than SCSI, but not by much, and is far easier to set up. Most newer computer systems are USB-ready. So if you can, go USB, but for most purposes the parallel interface will perform just fine.

Many newer computers even feature an Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP) which can speed things up nicely. You may have to go into the computers BIOS configuration to set up that port.

SIZE COUNTS

When you start looking for scanners, you'll come up against scanner resolution numbers. There are actually two measurements manufacturers will promote. The optical resolution of a scanner's CCD determines how much information a scanner can grab. In contrast to that is the scanner's interpolated resolution, which is the maximum that a scanner can achieve by "filling in" between pixels with special optical enhancements.

For most at home purposes, a 300 dot per inch (dpi) optical resolution is adequate. A 300 dpi scanner usually interpolates up to 1,200 dpi. However, reasonably-priced machines with 600 dpi optical resolution are more common than ever before so it's probably best to go with the bigger number if you can.

Another nifty feature to look for is push button controls, which can greatly assist a variety of scanning functions. Newer scanners are now equipped with a bank of buttons which when pushed can immediately scan a page and send it to the printer for a photocopy, or with the push of another, scan a page and immediately transfer it for processing by the optical character recognition software. It helps simplify a lot of scanner jobs.

Finally, almost all scanners ship with imaging software, as well as the neccessary drivers that make the scanner do its magic. While the imaging software is usually pretty good, there are a lot of great packages on the market offering a host of features you might need.

Adobe Photoshop is undeniably the leader of the pack, and has been for some time. Because of that, a number of third- party vendors supply plugins and modules for Photoshop to expand your digital manipulation capabilities even further.

So, hopefully, you'll now know a little bit more about scanners, and how to find one to meet your needs. With all the pretty pictures you'll be making, you'll no doubt want to rush right out and buy a nice new ink-jet printer.

Come to think of it, prices for printers are also dropping.

And wouldn't you know, my birthday is just around the corner.