Logitech's ScanMan EasyTouch: A companion for your notebook

Logitech's ScanMan EasyTouch: A companion for your notebook

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): With most scanners, one of the things we have to
do in connecting them with the PCs is to install their internal
interface card.

Small as it is, this card requires a standard ISA slot in the
motherboard. That makes using one scanner for more than one PC
immediately seem impractical, since you'd have to open up the
boxes to take out and re-install the card.

If you work with a notebook, the situation may even be worse.
Unless you have a docking station with standard ISA expansion
slots you won't have any place to put the card. Fortunately,
Logitech, an international company of Swiss origin, has a
solution for situations in which you have such a limited budget
that you can acquire just one scanner for an office that has
multiple PCs, or you have a notebook without a docking station.

A colleague has just got himself a Logitech ScanMan EasyTouch,
a product I already reported on in one of my articles a year ago.
As is usually the case with this colleague of mine, I got the
opportunity to play around and have a little hands-on experience
with this gadget before I install it on his Twinhead SubNote.

EasyTouch is not a color scanner, it's a gray scale one with
the capability to scan in up to 256 levels of gray. With a
maximum scanning resolution of 400 DPI, it can definitely do a
good job in scanning a black-and-white photo. It can also scan
text with colored or smudged backgrounds.

Installation

Installation is very straightforward. EasyTouch comes with a
pass-through adaptor that you attach to the parallel port of your
PC or notebook. On the other end of the adaptor there's a port
for your printer, so you can still print out documents while the
adaptor is attached.

One problem I had was that I had to move my mouse connector to
another serial port; the adaptor was a little too big, so I
wasn't able to use the serial port that was located on the same
board with the parallel port. If you have only one serial port
and one parallel board, you may have some difficulty here.

EasyTouch comes with a AC adaptor to power the scanner
adaptor. The scanner itself, which has a handsome dark-gray
color, is connected to the PC or notebook by plugging it to the
adaptor. Unfortunately, the cord may be a little too short if you
happen to be using a floor-standing tower PC.

The installation of the software couldn't be easier. There are
two important software modules for EasyTouch, namely, Foto-Touch
for scanning and fine-tuning images and OmniPage Direct for
scanning and reading text. OmniPage Direct is perhaps the
strongest point of this hardware-software bundle.

OmniPage is a product of Caere, one of the few top OCR makers
in the world. In fact, OmniPage Professional 5.0 has been
considered one of the best OCR product on the market today.
Direct is a subset of this award-winning product.

No hassle

I think one of the nicest things about Logitech products is
that the software is equipped with intelligence that makes
installation hassle-free. When I moved the port of my Logitech
TrackMan II from COM1 to COM2, for instance, I didn't have to run
Windows Setup program to change the specification. When Windows
was loaded after the connection had been moved, the mouse driver
was smart enough to detect to which port the pointing device was
now connected. In a sense, Logitech has brought us a taste of
Plug-and-play long before we get to see Windows Chicago.

With EasyTouch, the same holds true. After installation, all
we need to do is press the Test button to check whether
everything works. Only in extreme cases do we have to tinker with
its parameters.

Scanning images

With a 4.5" scanning width, EasyTouch will require you to scan
a full letter-sized page into more than one strips. You can
actually scan a page into up to four strips. Don't worry about
combining them, though. The software features a superb capability
to 'stitch' the strips together to form a single image--as long
as you scan the strips in a perfectly parallel direction and with
an overlap of between .5" to 1.5". The time the software takes to
stitch the strips depends on your system configuration. The
result of the stitching process is amazingly flawless, though.

If you move too fast, the green light on the scanner will turn
to red. A speed bar on the bottom of the scan window will also
turn to red. If you have set it up too, a beep will be heard each
time the scanner software cannot keep up with you.

Once the image is scanned, you can do a couple of things to
it. You can smooth the edges, or you can sharpen them, for
example. At your disposal you also have a number of tools that
resemble higher end image editors, such as the tool that enables
you to cut out a freehand-shaped piece of the image and move it
around. The complete set of these tools is kept in a drawer, and
you can select some or all of them and make them available in the
toolbox. You can select from a number of brush tips and specify
its opacity.

Images can be exported into four flavors of TIFF, the standard
BMP, PCX, JPEG, or EPS file format. You can also specify the
color depth of the image to be saved, whether in 24-bit or 4-bit
color.

Scanning text

The ability to scan text directly into your application is
perhaps the strongest asset of this piece of equipment. You can
very easily add a menu item in your word processor and
spreadsheet programs, such as Winword 6.0, Ami Pro 3.01, Excel
and Quattro Pro for Windows 5.0 that will activate the OCR and
the scanner. You will have to launch Direct first before you load
any of these programs.

When you click on Acquire Text, a dialog box with a scan
window such as the one you can see in the accompanying
illustration will appear. You can scan your text from top to
bottom, from left to right, or even from right to left.
Underneath the scan window there's also a box containing
necessary information including what you should do next. I really
like the icons, the buttons, and the overall layout of the dialog
box; they're all very intuitive. If you think that your scanned
text image was too blurred for the OCR to read, you can press
Rescan and do it again.

When you're sure your scanned text image is good enough to
minimize recognition errors, you press the Done button, and
everything will be done automatically for you. You'll be able to
see the process, although there's nothing you can do except abort
it.

On the bottom left of the illustration I have Ami Pro 3.01
containing text that I have scanned from EasyTouch manual. In
fact, it is the same piece of text as the one in the scan window
above it. You'll see a number of errors immediately, and I'll
talk about them shortly. However, you'll also notice that the
text that has been imported directly into Ami Pro still retains
its character attributes, such as fonts, font styles (bold,
italic, etc.) and font sizes. The ability to retain these
character attributes are just one of the features touted by
OmniPage.

Other features of Direct include the ability to scan and
recognize text in multiple columns and tables. This enables you
to scan figures directly into your spreadsheet.

Downsides

The ability to recognize characters with zero error depends on
a number of factors. If the print quality of the original
document is excellent, the fonts used are the standard ones, and
the scanning process is also perfect, you can expect 100 percent
perfect recognition. There will be no error.

But life is always a little bit less than perfect, and the
situation is worse with a hand-held scanner. You have to train
your hand to move steadily without zig-zagging at all. It will
definitely take some time, and given the short time I have had to
play around with it I should say that the errors you have seen in
the illustration can be attributed to my relative unfamiliarity
with this type of scanner. I'm sure the situation would have been
different if I had used my ScanJet IIC.

Another thing that I think may have contributed to the errors
is the lightness of the scanner itself. I have had some
experience with Logitech ScanMan Color, and its weight seems to
have helped stabilize its movement. However, if you think about
it again, EasyTouch is meant to be an accompaniment to your
notebook. As such, the less weight is of course the better.

To compensate for the limitations of the OCR, you usually have
to use a spell-checker. That is possible only if you work on
documents in English or a number of other major languages. If
your scanned document is in Bahasa Indonesia, you're largely out
of luck. However, depending on the level of accuracy of the
recognition process, correcting the errors may still beat having
to retype the entire document.

So, if you need a low-cost but highly capable replacement for
a typist that you can take with you into your hotel room without
creating a disgraceful image of yourself, EasyTouch -- at the price
of less than one third of an HP ScanJet IICX -- is perhaps what you
should buy.