Have you had the experience of trying to purge old documents, photos, photo albums? Has Digitization been part of that picture? consider the Epson Perfection 4180 photo, flat bed scanner.
In this review, i'm focussing on the image capture attributes of the scanner; i haven't done enough with the document capture - that''ll be part II.
There are stacks of boxes with old papers, documents, photos, photo albums taking up way too much space. And this is after i've purged a ton. Digitization seems like a compromise: get rid of it, but not really.
My friends in archaeology are still dubious about digitization as a strategy: what happens when the power fails or the format changes? there are horror stories to be sure of data being locked on disk formats for which players are rare, and even if they can be found, bit rot is no doubt a possibility. Paper, they claim, requires no power supply. Hieroglyphics can still be seen and read today.
And maybe that's true. Certainly all the folks involved in JISC's digitization program, to get content in their archives digitized for greater access, are concerned with changing formats for information. And maybe, if, as mentioned in a previous post, as per the interview with James Howard Kunstler, the oil disappears and power sources are limited, digital devices will go social rather than personal, and the convenience / availability of the digital will disappear.
But maybe if that comes to pass, there'll be some warning, and at that point i'll get to think more judiciously about which are the precious things to be printed out to whatever passes for paper, and which are the things that can sink into bit rot? Maybe that won't be so bad, either.
In the meantime, i'm going with digitization. To that end, i've wanted a fast, good quality scanner. And after trying a bunch, i think i've found a solution adequate to my requirements/budget: the epson perfection 4180 photo, flatbed scanner.
Great Color; Very Fast Scans
The scanner works over usb2, and it's fast. That's the main thing: deep image resolution, great color matching and FAST. I've tried a number of the siblings to this unit (in the 2XXX zone) that have half the color resolution, and seemingly half the speed, despite all being USB2 machines.
I also prefer this to the canons i've used in a similar range: espon has TWAIN drivers; canon seems not.
Another nice thing: I'm connecting this scanner to a final generation titanium powerbook that does not have usb2 on board, so i use a PC Card with usb2 on it and it works just fine - this cannot be said for all devices requiring a usb2 hub and run off a pc card rather than on-board ports.
Software - Only So-So
The software takes a bit to get used to but has some nice features for bulk-ish image capture.
The Scan and Save - nice for archiving - lets you choose Full Auto, Home or Professional Modes. Before hitting the scan mode, however, you can set a path and a prefix and suffix for each of the images about to be scanned. This is great if you have a series like "GradPhotos" or whatever. After making these choices, you get to scanning mode: each mode, as you can imagine, gives you more levels of detailed control over the scan. If you're just whacking in your snaps, full auto mode is great: you can put a bunch of photos on the glass, and the software will detect and scan in each photo as an individual image. The color matching is great, so it's not necessary to pre-tweak 99% of the photos in this category you might scan. It's impressive.
Batch Image Scanning and Image Detection. Weird but Cool
Here's what's taking some getting used to: when a file is scanned, it's not "saved" - it is stored in a tmp directory, but if you close the ap without saving, those tmps will be lost. Here's what happens:
From Scan and Save, in Full Auto mode, once the images are scanned, a window comes up that shows you what has been captured. Several options are available: at this point you can rename any of the files created, rotate the images, choose which scans you want to save, and, most excellent, decide if you want to scan more into this tmp set. This means that you can use the same labelling for as many scans as you want, and save them all in one go.
There's a trade off: i don't know (yet) what happens to those temps if the software crashes, so saving each set is not a bad idea. I've gone 3 sets of scans (4-5 images each scan) without incident.
By being able to name files while scanning, you can put enough of a cue into the images to be able to search on them later, or extend their file names later - the number of charcters in the Smart Panel name field is restricted.
The Save mechanism is dandy while using Full Auto mode for bulk scanning. For one offs in pro-mode, it becomes bizare. Once the image has been previewed for scanning, and is then scanned, i'm used to seeing the scanned image show up so that it can be assessed: does it need to be scanned again?
Here, in order to bring up the scanned image view, you need to close the pro panel. This causes that scrap-booky image viewer to show up. While you can enlarge the view, it's really pretty small.
Would prefer a way to view each scan in pro mode one off, rather than having to shut the mode and look in the scan and save viewer, and restart scan and save, which means restarting its preferences (naming files etc).
So that's two negatives: having to close off the "scan" control in order to bring up the scanned image; having no way of getting a large/zoomable image view. There is a scan and send to application, but i haven't been able to get it to work.
Bizare Software Update Instal Behaviour
And one truly bizare thing: in trying to get the sent to application feature to work, i downloaded and installed the latest driver from the epson site (2.6). That caused the scanner to no longer be recognized by the computer. Uninstalling 2.6 and reinstalling 2.5 from cd did not help: after multiple attempts it seemed the only thing that worked was to manually remove anything labelled "epson" from all over the disk, and reinstall from scratch. I'm still using the 2.5 driver. Don't really want to go through that again.
Apparently there are also a number of very good third party scanner software packages. If i get fed up with Epson's i'll be looking into those. But i didn't buy the scanner for the software - tho it wouldn't have been hard for Epson to make this package more usable! Who tests this stuff?
Documents and OCR...not tried yet - next report
I haven't tried the document scanning in detail yet, where getting quality text is critical. However, one of the reasons i got this scanner is that it also supports a document feeder.
For my stuff, scanning in a lot of hand written material is the main thing, so OCR isn't a biggie (it comes with both lightweight ocr and business card reading software), but being able to set up a bunch of pages to run at a clip could be awesome.
Image Format: TIF
the folks at the BOPCRIS digitization project, among other Digitization partners, are all using TIF for their archival scans. It's lossless, and also perhaps holds the best hope as a result for surviving file format changes. So i'm using TIF now, too. With harddrives being bigger and cheaper, and DVDs rather than CDs becoming more common for scans, bigger data files for images are less of an issue than they have been in the not too distant past.
Overview
The images are fab, the speed is wonderful, full auto mode is great for more or less batch scanning. The software is otherwise lame, but the hardware is grand for someone archiving their memories for life.
Simple observation - the latest rev of the apple powerbook line sports Superdrives which burn DVDs at 8X speed.
8X it seems is relative.
A stand alone LaCie 8X DVD burner - DVD - 12 mins
New Powerbook Superdrive -DVD - 24 mins
Both were burning the same amount of data. The LaCie external was driven by a 1ghz powerbook over firewire. The internal powerbook was a 1.5ghz machine.
Offered without comment.