PageScan Color: Sheet-fed scanner comes of age

PageScan Color: Sheet-fed scanner comes of age

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): The competition among small footprint scanners
is obviously heating up. You must remember PaperPort from
Visioneers, the first generation of this type of computer
paraphernalia. Then HP came along and released HP ScanJet 4s,
which was its own version of PaperPort. And just recently,
Logitech came out with its PageScan.

For Logitech to manufacture a page scanner is no surprise to
us at all. The company has long specialized in two different
types of input devices, i.e., scanners and mice. All Logitech
scanners in the past belonged to the handheld type. Experience
has shown that, in order to be able to work successfully with a
handheld scanner, one has to have a level of dexterity that
almost parallels that of a surgeon. When the new, sheet-fed model
of page scanner came along, computer users were excited. Finally
there was a scanner with the ability to scan a whole page without
taking up as much space on their desk as a flatbed scanner does,
and requiring less time and effort than a handheld scanner does
to produce good scans.

Common to today's generation of sheet-fed scanners is the
absence of the Power On or Start button. All we have to do is
connect the cables, run the program, and insert the paper to be
scanned into the paper intake slot. The moment it senses the edge
of the paper, the mechanism inside it jumps to life and swallows
the paper. It's so simple to use.

Ever since Logitech introduced it, PageScan Color has won rave
reviews from computer magazines. So, when Memori Primatama
informed me that they had already brought this product in, I
immediately asked them to let me try it out and review it.

Hardware

Logitech PageScan Color looks a little bit bulkier than its
competitors, which is unsurprising since this scanner is the only
color-capable among those available today. Despite its size, it
sits comfortably on top of the case of my medium tower PC.

The unit draws power from an adaptor that also connects it to
the parallel port. A separate power supply provides DC power to
this adaptor. The printer cable is attached to the adaptor, too.

The supplied cables are long enough to allow us to organize
our desk, although the numerous cables may get unwieldy at times.
The power supply adaptor, which works from a 230 volt outlet, is
rather oversized for today's standard. If you intend to carry
this scanner along with your notebook, you will wish that
Logitech had given you a more compact power supply.

The scanner itself consists of a base and a top unit. You may
think that you cannot use a sheet-fed scanner to scan a page from
a book, but with PageScan Plus you're in luck. If you need to
scan a page of a book or a bound report, you can simply detach
the top unit from the base and place it over the page. When you
click on the Start button on the screen, the motorized scanner
will start moving by itself. You only have to guide it. In other
words, you can use it as a motorized handheld scanner.

The highest scanning resolution levels are 200 for 24 bit
color, and 400 for text or grayscale images. During the
installation, the program will ask you to insert the Calibration
Card to get the best color scanning result.

The software

Good hardware is only half the story. A piece of good hardware
is not so useful if it doesn't come with equally good software
that enables us to tap its fullest potential. Logitech made an
excellent decision by bundling PageScan Color with the special
version of PaperMaster electronic filing system from Documagix,
Inc. We'll have a close look at it later.

The control center for the scanner has one button for each of
the five tasks we can accomplish with it. We click on the Text
button if we want to scan text, the Image button if we want to
scan images, or the File button if we want to scan and file
hardcopy documents electronically. We click on the Fax button if
we want to fax a hardcopy with our fax/modem, or we click on the
Copy button if we just want to use the scanner and the printer as
a photocopier.

Each time we click on one of these buttons, a dialog box will
appear. We can choose our options, such as whether we want to
scanning normal text, small and poor quality text, or text with a
tinted background. We can tell the software whether we are going
to scan the entire page or only certain sections of it. We can
even tell the software the name of the file to automatically save
the scanned text, or to let us give the name and decide the file
format after the scanning process. The options are very
thoughtfully provided, yet we can bypass them for subsequent
jobs.

We click on OK, and a different dialog box will appear,
indicating that the scanner is ready to take our printed
document. All we have to do now is insert it into the scanner.
The scanning process for text and images are quick, but if we
choose the 400 DPI color it takes much longer.

The OCR is not as powerful as OmniPage Pro, of course. For
instance, we cannot edit a recognized text before it is saved.
When I tried reading a page with text printed in Helvetica, the
OCR read the open quotation mark " as TM. But the rest of the
text had no error.

PaperMaster SE

PaperMaster SE helps organize our scanned documents in a very
intuitive way. The program's interface resembles a set of filing
cabinets. We open each drawer by double-clicking on it. Inside
every drawer, we can create hanging folders.

The sample folders that come in the "Open Me First!" drawer
give a very good example of how our files can and should be
organized. We can create as many folders as we wish inside a
drawer, and we can create as many drawers as we like, too. We can
set the properties of the folders and drawers, such as their
color and name, using the menu that we invoke by clicking on the
right mouse button.

Inside each folder, we can place an electronic copy of our
documents. So, for instance, in our "Finance" drawer, we can
place scanned copies of our expense reports, tax records, bank
statements, etc.

If we have to scan documents in a hurry and worry about filing
later, we can scan them into the Inbox tray. Then we can click
and drag individual document copy into the appropriate folder and
drawer when we have the opportunity.

If you have to scan a page sideways, don't worry. PaperMaster
can rotate the page 90 degrees to the left or to the right to
make sure that you can read the text on the screen. Images can be
enhanced, too.

Individual documents can be viewed on screen in a very
practical manner. When we click on the document name found in the
list on the folder, the viewing window will be loaded. We can
choose from the thumbnail representations of the pages the one
that we would like to view. The viewing area is large enough, and
we can zoom in to see details or to read poor quality text. We
can even annotate the pages. A yellow button on the page
indicates a note. Of course, we can print out the displayed page
any time we need to.

Final word

Needless to say, for most business purposes, Logitech PageScan
Color fits the bill nicely. You can scan a page and fax it
immediately to a colleague using your fax/modem. The best thing
about this scanner is its bundled PaperMaster document filing
system. It really helps you organize your documents by scanning
them and then keeping them in digital form. I would even suggest
that you buy the full-version of PageMaster for your office and
even home use. You can use PageScan's OCR to "read" hardcopy and
import it into Winword documents.

As a replacement for a photocopier, PageScan Color may not be
the best choice. Because of the shared parallel port, the
software starts printing only after we've completed the scanning
of the originals. It requires a lot of hard disk space to save
the image temporarily.

With its 200 DPI color resolution, Logitech PageScan is not
going to replace a desktop publisher's more expensive flatbed
scanner. However, for business use, it certainly is a far better
choice than a handheld scanner. In fact, it's the most reasonable
choice.