I'm looking for advice on scanning 35mm transparencies. I have a Primax Colorado flatbed scanner and lots of slides.
You have a number of options, which range in cost from £70 to over £700. As you already have a flatbed scanner your cheapest option is a very basic 'SlideScan' or 'FilmScan' adaptor. This is little more than a mirror arrangement that sits on the glass on your existing scanner. Output is reasonable, but it isn't a sophisticated method. The end result tends to be a little dark and, as it allows you to scan only one or two slides at a time using a rather slow flatbed scanner scanhead, it's also rather tedious for high-volume scanning. An alternative is to get a dedicated 35mm film scanner, which will produce a better quality scanned output. These start at about £130, although cheap options tend to be low resolution and relatively slow to operate, either due to scanning speed or because they will accept only a limited number of slides at a time. For the best slide/film scanners at a sensible price, you'll need to part with at least £400 for a high-resolution, high-speed HP, Nikon, Epson or Minolta option. In our book the Nikon CoolScan III is probably the best on the market at the moment - although with a film/slide scanner Labs test scheduled, this may change - but at £600 it may well be outside your budget.
If you're working to a budget, a limited resolution film scanner is worth contemplating; it will be easier to use and offer better quality than a flatbed scanner with a transparency adaptor. For use with your Primax scanner the £70 SlideScan is obviously the cheapest option and depending on your intended use for the digital images -may well suffice. If you don't know what you want we'd recommend this as a starting point, given that something slightly better will cost about twice this amount and anything significantly better is going to cost more than five times as much.
There are other flatbed scanners that come with adaptors and bolt-on adaptors for a limited number of digital cameras, which may present additional options. For more details on many of the options available as well as pricing indications and other scanning-related information, have a look on the internet at www.megapixels.co.uk and www.scannerdepot.co.uk.
Following our dismissal last month of Dave Hadaway's chances of finding a Windows NT driver for his Plustek Optic Pro 9630P scanner, a couple of readers have written in to disagree with our claim.
Firstly, Matthew Wright, who suggests that Dave may have some luck in trying Microtek drivers and, secondly (and most usefully), Martyn Reason who claims to have a fully functional Plustek 9630P under NT4. Martin suggests simply downloading the correct driver from
www.plusek.com and reinstalling. Ah, why didn’t we think of that?Well, we did last month and found the Plustek site to be unhelpful, to say the least. It does however appear to be back and fully revamped now - and low and behold, there does seem to be NT support for the 9630P (albeit a beta driver) at
www.plustek.com/taiwan/englishlnt.htm Hopefully, this isn't too late hopefully, Dave didn't do as we at Clinic initially suggested and gave his scanner to a mate (or at least, if he did, that his mate's feeling charitable and gives it back).
I scan colour pictures to save in 'My Documents' at 300dpi and normally save them as Windows bitmap files, but I have recently been told to save them as JPeg or Tiff files. All I want to do is be able to stretch the image as required for my work without impairing the quality.
Could you please advise which one would be the most suitable out of the three, or recommend an alternative?
Once you start scanning colour pictures, you soon become very aware of the size of images. Having image files larger than you need really slows down a computer.
For example, 300 dots per inch (dpi) means that there are 90,000 (ie 300x300) pixels per square inch, and hence 1,800,000 pixels in a small4'x5' photograph. If you store them in 'Truecolour', there are at least 24 bits per pixel, but, for convenience and speed, most Truecolour drivers use 32 bits per pixel. That will give you a 7.2Mb file size.
The 'Windows bitmap' or BMP file format stores images in just the way they are held in display memory. Fortunately, since pictures typically contain blocks of the same colour, you can get great space savings by storing them in compressed form. The simplest form of compression, known as Run Length Encoding or RLE, simply stores data by giving the number of pixels with the same colour value. There are also more elaborate compression schemes, which can also handle repeating patterns. These are all forms of 'lossless' compression, in that the original information is retained and you can recreate the bitmap image exactly. This works great on regular patterns with simple colours, such as simple business graphics designs, but are less effective with a large range of subtly different colours as in a colour photograph. So most pictures are stored with Jpeg compression, which describes the picture by means of formulae that approximate the original image. These formulae will lose some of the original detail - the extent of loss depending on the extent of the compression you choose. Turning to file formats, there are many around but RLE, Gif and compressed Tiff files are all lossless compression. The standard Tiff files do not have compression and are about the same size as a bitmap file. JPeg is by far the most common 'Iossy' compression method, and will generally give best results on photos. None of these compression methods, except perhaps JPeg, will give compression quite as good as a Zip file. If you place a BMP file in a Zip archive, the resulting file size will give you an idea of the maximum compression you can achieve with lossless methods.
In general, you should aim to scan your image in the size and colour depth required for final output. If you want to place images on the Web for example, the final display will probably be at around 75dpi, so scanning at 300dpi is going to give you an image 16 times as large as you need. If your final output is 256 colours (the maximum for the Gif file format) there is no point in scanning at 32 bits per pixel. But if you are going to rescale the image, you want to keep as much detail as possible. Ideally, you would convert the image to the size and colour depth you want then store in the most compact format. If this is impossible, the JPeg format, being formulae rather than pixel-based, probably scales better than most other formats.
Since upgrading to Windows NT 4 I have been unable to configure my Plustek Optic Pro 9630P scanner and all attempts to get suitable drivers have failed. I am desperately in need of updated drivers. Where can I go for help?
First the bad news. Hopefully you weren't too attached to the scanner because a parallel port scanner is about as much use under NT as a chocolate fireguard. You can forget about dreaming of a cheap USB alternative too, because the only way to scan under NT4 is with a Scsi device. Sorry for being so negative, but the good news is that your Plustek Optic Pro 9630P would probably make a fantastic gift for a mate with a Windows 95 or 98 PC.
I'm looking for a basic colour flatbed scanner to run from the parallel port of my ancient 486/66MHz PC. The PC is running (just) Windows 95 with 12Mb Ram. I don't want to spend much as the value of the PC hardware itself is barely above scrap value. Everything these days seems to be designed to run from a USB port so I would be grateful if you could suggest a suitable product.
Your system's specification is well below that recommended by any of today's scanner manufacturers, even for products discontinued in the past couple of years. This is more to do with the bundled software that accompanies new scanners so if you install just the scanner control software you may get away with it. One possibility is Canon's FB 630P Parallel scanner, which costs around £54.99. However, there are no guarantees that it will work on such a system and you may find you'll need to replace your entire system before you have anything even resembling a useful scanning platform.
In the review of scanners that you carried out in PCF 109, the Acer ScanPrisa 640 was highly recommended. My husband would like to buy me one as a birthday present but we have no idea where to get one. Our local PC World doesn't stock this make. We live in the Warwick/Leamington area. Could you please tell us where to get one of these locally or failing that, suggest an Internet outlet?
No, not failing that, starting with it. Internet shopping rules and PC totally sucks. There is, in any case, a certain degree of confusion about whether PC World stocks Acer scanners or not. I rang the contact number for Acer (you did try this, didn't you?) that was listed in the review and spoke to one person who thought it did and one who thought it didn't. Acer is just the manufacturer, but it gave me the phone number of the distributor (Midwich 01379 649200) who told me that it definitely did but then again (after a moment's thought) maybe it didn't. My local PC World didn't, but thought that other branches in my area might.
You see, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. You don't get any of this on the Internet. There aren't any branches, you just click Order and type in your credit card number. I bought a scanner a couple of weeks ago and I certainly didn't stand around in a queue waiting to be served. No, I bought it from Simply Computers at www.simply.co.uk (or 01208 4982100 if you absolutely insist). It stocks Acer scanners and you don't get electric shocks all the time from walking across acres of nylon carpet. Dabs Direct (www.dabs.com or 01870 1293010) sells Acer products, too.
I recently discovered the WSH. and installed it for use with my scanner. For some reason, the start button on my Epson GT7000 only launched either Imaging for Windows or the supplied Page Manager software by default, and there's no obvious way to add other programs to the options list, probably because no other program can be set up to scan via command line parameters.
After a little searching in the registry (via Regmon, mentioned in HelpDesk several months ago), I found the program list and added the command line of a Windows Script to it. This script launches PSP, and then (via the SendKeys method) selects the Acquire option from the File menu. It now works perfectly, although I'd like to add a feature where it launches a different program depending on how many times the button on the scanner is pressed. Is this possible with WSH? Since you didn't print it in the magazine. I don't know if you know about the reference on the WSH available on
http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/ which is downloadable and contains all the methods, properties etc in WSH. The VBScript reference on the same site contains details of the FileSystem object, which can be used to do many of the things that batch files can in DOS (and some of the things that they can't).You have uncovered part of the mechanism by which Windows responds to a USB still-image device's start button. A program called Stimon.exe (Still image monitor} sits in memory watching for the device driver to signal that the button has been pressed Stimon then looks in the registry; in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Stilllmage\Registered Applications, to find out which programs are registered as image acquisition handlers. If there's more than one, the list is presented in a dialog box for you choose, or it is launched directly. All the program command lines have a feature in common -they are suffixed with a pair of switches.
Path\to\someprogram.exe
/StiDevice:%1 /StiEvent:%2
These are a generic link to client applications. To add new applications to the list, try following the same style. The switches definitely won't work if you add them to a command line in the Start/Run dialog, because %1 and %2 are placeholders for data, which is filled by Stimon. For instance on my system, when I press the button and choose an application, the switches become
/StiDevice:Image\0000
/StiEvent:{7d245e24-56c0-11d1-bed9-00aa002f3325}
The information after the colons may be different on your computer. If you can find the data being passed to the application in the %1 and %2 positions, you can set up shortcuts which invoke applications in image acquisition mode, as if you'd pressed the start button. To discover the command line arguments you could use a batch file, but it's easier with the program 'Command line peeker.exe', which you will find on the SuperDisc. Once installed, copy the EXE file to the same folder as the program you want to check. Rename the original program's EXE file -just stick an underscore on the front _ then rename mine to that of the original. Command Line Peeker will now be invoked instead of the usual application When run, it just displays the command line arguments You can copy them to the clipboard by selecting all the text and pressing [Ctrl][C]. Not all computer programs are written to respond to these command line switches, but you should give this way a go before resorting to a script. The idea would be to rip out all the other registered applications so that the start button caused a script to be launched immediately. If the script hung around for a second or two to watch for any further instances being launched, note them and close them down, you could cobble up a 'one press for program A, two presses for program B' system. However, for me the button response time is a second or more and there's no buffering, so it's no good for rapid-fire clicking.