Little Scanners for Big Jobs

By Don Rittner

Scanners are one of the best peripherals you can have for your personal computer, and the cost - less than $200 - for a good quality scanner is common place today. However, you are no longer restricted to bulky flatbed scanners that take up half your desk. In fact, we are going to look at three unique types of scanners — pen, slide, and petite.

The IrisPen

How many times have you been in a library and wanted to save a few sentences or quotes from a magazine or journal but felt it was a real waste of time and paper to Xerox the whole page. Why not simply capture the sentence directly into your laptop!

The IrisPen is a pen sized scanner that fits comfortable in your hand, and allows you to enter data (text, numbers, bar codes and handwritten numbers) into any Windows or Mac application. What you get is real editable text, right at the cursor position, and Optical Character Reading (OCR) one letter at a time. I use it to scan in business cards that folks give me.

How easy is it? You simply slide the IrisPen over the text you want and it’s captured right into your application— Microsoft Word, Excel, even a database like Filemaker for us Mac users, at speeds up to 1000 characters per second!

Besides ease of use, the IrisPen has some nifty features too! It recognizes up to 56 languages. Looking at old hand written documents? It reads wavy and distorted characters from size 6 to 22 points. The pen has a programmable button on it that I use to enter data directly into FileMaker by making a click of the button a carriage return. Since it runs through your USB port (they have a parallel port version too) it operates on both Mac and PC and software for both is included. There are two versions of the IrisPen and both are under $200. I have seen cheaper prices online. I don’t go anywhere without it. IrisPen is headquartered in one of my favorite countries, Belgium.

Remember Slides?

Yes, I bet you do and I have a few thousand of them. A good slide scanner would set you back several thousand dollars just a couple of years ago. Not anymore. Pacific Image Electronics has several inexpensive slide scanners for the home market. Now you can take all those vacation slides and bring them into the digital age.

I have the PrimeFilm 1800 Silver, one of their scanners that is targeted to amateur photographers, home page designers, computer users, and desktop publishers. This scanner has a combination of high resolution, natural color reproduction, and high scanning speed.

You can scan and convert into digital any color slide (mounted or unmounted), negatives (35mm, or strip films), and B&W in 35mm format. The scanner has a resolution of 1800dpi and 36-bit scanning capability, and it has an improved color tone algorithm to preserve every photographic detail with incredible accuracy.

The scanner is bundled with SilverFast SE 5.0, a German made software from LaserSoft Imaging, and Photoshop LE 5.0. The SilverFast® SE 5.0 software has an intuitive user interface with professional capabilities, allowing both novice and advanced users good control and adjustment over the image. The software supports more than 120 difference scanner brands as well. Since the scanner is USB, just plug and play. Price wise they are available for less than $200!

You Call This a Flatbed?

I scan a lot of photographs. When I cannot use my IrisPen or have a need for my slide scanner, I whip out my little Canon 650U. I love Canon. I have two Canon cameras that are over 30 years old and work like I bought them yesterday. I have a Canon copier that is at least 10 years old and works the same. So why shouldn’t their scanners be the same quality— they are! This little flatbed that is about one inch thick and scans a whole page. It plugs into my PowerBook USB port and runs off that - no external power supply needed. The Canon software suite is excellent. It takes me about two minutes to pull the little scanner from my PowerBook case, plug in the USB port, boot up the PowerBook and software and scan! It’s that easy! I paid less than $100 for the scanner. While the optical resolution is only 600 dpi x 1200 dpi you can software interpolate and get 9600 dpi x 9600 dpi. The scans from this little machine have been published in several of my history books.

So there you have it. Three special little scanners that do a big job without breaking your bank account.

Inside the Net appears in the daily Troy Record newspaper in Troy, NY