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.