Consider affordable scanners for your personal needs

By Vishnu K. Mahmud

JAKARTA (JP): After an incident with a mouse in my sock drawer, I decided a little spring cleaning was in order. As a result, a stack of magazine clippings, term papers, negatives, slides and photographs lie on one side of the room, towering over the actual junk I was throwing out. I needed to throw out more rubbish!

But surely not my essay on the renaissance from high school or the photos of the eventful class trip to Khao Yai National Park, where we broke a bridge by accident. And definitely not my two- year collection of Wired Magazine articles that followed the birth of the Internet as we know it. Even after coming face-to- face with the cousin of the plague-carrying rodent, I am still a pack rat at heart.

But this is the digital age. So there was only one answer: scan them.

Flatbed (or desktop) scanners used to be extremely expensive and complicated, requiring specialized hardware, such as Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) cards. Scanners are cheaper now, especially with the strengthening of the rupiah, and user- friendly, so much so that even a small child can scan and edit pictures.

But scanners nowadays are not just for digitizing photographs to be e-mailed to friends and family. The latest generation of consumer scanners can also scan slides and film negatives, transferring the finished pictures onto the computer screen. In addition, with the help of optical character recognition (OCR) software, flatbeds can also scan printed text into editable digital files, such as a MS Word document.

Scanners are rated by their bit depth (how many colors it can record) and optical resolution (how much detail it can see). The higher the number, the better the scanned result will be.

A scanner with 48-bit depth will outperform one with 24-bit depth since it can capture the image more accurately colorwise, while a scanner with an optical resolution of 1200 dots per inch (dpi) will definitely produce a sharper picture then that of a 600 dpi one.

But there are drawbacks. The higher the bit depth and resolution, the larger the file size will be. Simple pictures with the size of 12 megabytes are not uncommon. To display a photograph at full size (full screen) on a monitor, scanning at 300 dpi and 24-bit depth is quite satisfactory.

With a glut of scanners to choose from, buyers should determine what their needs are and find the flatbed that suits them. Get a small scanner with a few bells and whistles if you just want to share photos with people over the net, or a professional (and expensive) photo scanner with a transparency adapter if you choose to archive slides and negatives.

A scanner usually shines light from the bottom of the unit to reflect light off a photograph, which is pinned between the glass and cover, and records it. Transparency adapters are basically scanner covers that shine the light from the top down, thus "through" the slides and/or negatives into the recording "eye" of the scanner.

Having a transparency adapter does add to the price of a flatbed but you can get one for under Rp 1.5 million (US$175). Simple "reflective" scanners for photos are under Rp 1 million.

Those of you with a lot of documents can also scan your printed material (sorry, no handwritten notes) into the computer in order to edit and print them using your favorite word processor. It is easier to scan and edit than retyping 500 pages of text.

For this, you would need the OCR software, which is usually bundled with the scanner. You can also purchase the software separately with OmniPage by ScanSoft, which is recommended by CNET.com as the best OCR software package.

Another point to consider while looking for a scanner is the input device, which factors in the length of time for scanning. Some scanners still require SCSI cards as they transfer data into a computer faster compared to that of a parallel port scanner. But nowadays, scanners can use universal serial bus (USB) ports, which are now more common and faster then parallel ports.

So as I start to input my photos and thesis into the computer, I can only reflect on how fast technology has advanced.

It feels like it was only yesterday that I slaved over a manual typewriter with whiteout in hand, writing my final thesis. Now I practically have a complete print shop with scanner and color printer, tools powerful enough to publish a book on my own.

The writer is an IT consultant based in Jakarta. Questions? Contact Vishnu at vmahmud@id.mweb.com.