The Software is Often the Key
Jul 08 '01
The Bottom Line Good home scanners are readily available for well under $100. To get the most out of the hardware, Software is the key.
Scanners today have dropped dramatically in price so that they are readily affordable at under $100 for a good, useful one. The typical home user does not need or want (because of the extremely large file sizes) super high resolution scanned images. If you are scanning newspaper, magazine or book articles for information or for eventual insertion into another document, you will find that the ease of the task as well as the inherent speed, accuracy and versatility are more a function of the software used. As long as the hardware and software are compatible, such as is the case for TWAIN devices, it is the software that makes the difference for the user. With the price pressures involved in marketing the hardware, you should not expect the manufacturers to bundle the best possible software. There are also many little known but excellent software packages available. Here is one to consider and you can even download a free trial version to see how it fits your needs. It is from Russia, with love (and a new found profit motive.)
Sputnik probably was the first wake up call for most Americans to take Russian technology seriously. Fortunately, times have changed so there is no longer any threat associated with Russian technology. In fact, there is now mutual benefit and normal trade. Scanner users, especially those with a need to scan and import quickly are current beneficiaries of the new relationships. Abbyy FineReader 5.0 is the latest version of the Abbyy FineReader Version 4, a winner of many prestigious industry awards. The heart of the system is the FineReader engine, incorporated into the OCR products of many well-known manufacturers including, Siemens, Samsung, Sumimoto, Microtek, Acer, Mustek and Umax.
The minimum system requirements for installation are:PC with 133 MHz CPU, Windows 2000/NT/95/98, 32 MB RAM, IE 3.02 (IE 5.01 is included in the S/W package, 40 MB hard Disk Space, TWAIN compatible scanner/digital camera/fax-modem, CD-ROM Drive, Pointing Device and VGA monitor.
I installed it on a K6-2 366 running under Windows 98SE, with 128M RAM and greater resources than those cited above. There were no installation problems. There were the usual, Full, Minimal and Custom installation choice, I chose custom. During installation an icon is automatically inserted into Microsoft Word, so that FineReader may be executed directly from Word.
Upon being opened, you may select to communicate with the scanner via the scanners TWAIN interface or FineReaders’ Interface. The TWAIN-SOURCE option allows you to choose. The manual explains the differences. You may switch between them with a mouse click.
I wondered why I should get excited about another scanner software product until I installed FineReader and actually used it. I had a set of old black/white photographs that I wanted to e-mail to an old military buddy so I decided to use the Abbyy software. I placed the photos on my flatbed scanner and let the FineReader do its thing. To my surprise, it recognized that these were individual photos and set up a folder with each of the pictures as a separate file. Pretty neat, now I could view them and choose which to send or zip up the folder and send them all. Of course, transmitting them just took a mouse click. I could also save the folder and choose a graphic format to save the files in. When I looked at the scanned images on my monitor, I was pleasantly surprised that they actually looked better than the originals.
For those unfamiliar with scanner software, there is a Wizard Bar that has menu choices of Scanning, Reading, Checking and Saving, so that you are led by the hand through the steps. You can’t go wrong without working at it.
FineReader can recognize the structure of a document including columns, graphic inserts and table formatting. It readily retains the page layout. A neat feature is its ability to recognize and scan two pages at a time from a book. I like this for creating backup copies of manuals.
For technical applications, FineReader recognizes superscripts, subscripts and simple chemical notation.
I tried scanning several different documents including magazine pages with complex layouts, low quality Fax, newspaper pages and bound books. The recognition accuracy was as close to perfect as I have ever seen. FineReader supports 176 languages, far more than the three that I can handle. The scanned material can be saved in HTML or PDF formats, so that you may rapidly load scanned material onto web sites.
There are several versions of FineReader. The subject here is called FineReader Pro and retails for $99. The FineReader Office version includes a bar code reader and a form filler application and is designed for networked situations. The Office Version retails for $399.
There is a try-it-and-buy-it version available on their web site, www.abbyy.com.
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