Taking sophisticated scan at old photo enhancement

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): It's really amazing how scanners have become so pervasive today. One of the reasons is certainly the fact that their prices have become much more affordable. Even a flatbed scanner has now become so cheap that we've all actually run out of excuses for buying a handheld. A sheetfeed scanner will make sense only if you really don't have the space for a flatbed in your work cubicle.

Helping to make scanning part of our everyday computing life, Canon has come up with the great idea of adding the scanning capability to its printers through a special printing head replacement. I will review these Canon products one of these days.

Another thing that has pushed the acceptance of scanners is their ease of setting up and use. Not only are the bundled software programs more intuitive and richer in features, connecting the scanner to the PC no longer requires you to grab a screwdriver and open up the CPU casing.

Older scanners came with proprietary cards to connect the device to the PC. Some relied on the SCSI connection port, if there was one on your PC. Newer models connect to the PC via the printer port. The latest generation, as you may already know, uses a new type of connection called Universal Serial Bus, or USB.

ScanJet 4100C

I briefly discussed the new and sleek USB-based ScanJet 4100C late last October. Courtesy of Hewlett-Packard, I had the chance to test drive one of them. As I mentioned in that article, this new Rp 2.9 million model is at the lowest end, the midrange being the 5100C (Rp 3.6 million) and the top-end the 6200C (Rp 5.2 million) and the 6250C (Rp 6.5 million) models. However, don't let the lower price fool you. This is as capable a scanner as the 5100C that I reviewed some months ago.

The specs are quite decent, although this scanner is more suitable for home use. It features 600 DPI hardware resolution and 1200 DPI when enhanced with software, software functions such as deskewing that straightens text and images although you have placed the original at a slight angle on the page.

Connecting the low profile scanner to my test PC was easy. The power adapter, as with ScanJet 5100C, is also external. There was a latch that I had to slide to the side before I could use the device. This latch locks the scanner head securely in place so that it won't get damaged during transport. After I connected the supplied USB cable, which looks more like a mouse cable although a little stiffer, I was ready for the first scanning job.

The scanning software is very easy to use. As with the ScanJet 5100C, one pass is required and the image data is stored in the memory. When you zoom, no additional scanning is needed. The included PhotoDeluxe 2.0 and Adobe Type Manager from Adobe are really nice to have.

With this scanner, restoring old and damaged photographs such as the one you can see in the accompanying illustration is very easy. The unit has two buttons. Press the right one, and the HP PrecisionScan LT scanning utility will jump to life and automatically start scanning. You'll then have the option to transfer the scanned image to PhotoDeluxe 2.0 for creative adventures, including creating your personal calendars and Christmas cards.

Or, you can have the scanned text sent to an included OCR program so that you can edit it. Press the left button, and the scanner will send the scanned image to the printer to give you a copy of whatever you put on top of it.

One thing that struck me was the warming up time that was required each time I began using the scanner after a period of idleness. This typically took 20 seconds. An animated screen display says if the scanner is being warmed up. I guess the lamp needs to be warmed up because the scanner does not have a power switch. The lamp is turned off automatically after several minutes of inactivity to preserve its quality.

About USB

The USB is an attempt to replace the slower parallel and serial ports for connecting peripheral devices such as printers, modems and monitors. The standard was developed jointly by industry giants Compaq, Digital Equipment, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, and Nortel, and has been well accepted by the industry.

One or two USB ports are found in most PCs and notebooks that are not more than two years old. You will need to install the later version of Windows 95 or any version of Windows 98 to get the necessary system support for the port.

How fast is the USB connection? At 1.5 MBps, USB is certainly slower than SCSI or any of its present contenders -- FireWire, Fiber Channel and IBM's Serial Storage Architecture. However, for devices and components such as the monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer and scanner, it is fast enough.

Are the parallel and serial ports going to die? Maybe not soon, as there are still so many parallel and serial devices out there already. Eventually they will, though. Even the attention- grabbing iMac from Apple has only one port out of its CPU to connect external devices, and it is a USB.

The speed of the parallel port is about 2 Mbps (bits, not bytes), and is therefore about six times slower than the USB. Theoretically, you can have up to 126 devices connected to your PC using the USB connection, while the serial and parallel ports typically support only one device (only a few devices -- e.g., CD writers and scanners -- can have a pass-through parallel port connection).

Another thing that goes for the USB is that it has a Plug and Play capability, which the parallel port does not. Connect a new device to the USB port, and the PC will notice it right away.

And, as heralded by the ScanJet 4100C heralds, the USB devices are already arriving.