Sunday, June 02, 2013

Scansnap as art scanner

I've mentioned the Fujitso Scansnap before. (In the meantime I got a Mac model.) It's a wonderful, fully automatic document scanner. It rights up documents after scanning*. Does automatic OCR if you want (Optical Character Recognition, reads text off a scan and imbeds it in the file, so you can search for text later). It scans both sides at once! It really great for scanning in your paperwork and such.

It is not a flatbed scanner, and it's not expensive, so it's not meant to be an art scanner. (Art in the wider sense, meaning images.) (One weakness is that the art may shift as it passes through the scanner; and of course it only takes thin objects.) But on a whim, I tested it as such, and I'm impressed.
The durn thing automatically detects if a document should be scanned and treated as color, or greyscale, or B/W. And this quick, one-take scan of a brochure is as perfect as I could have expected in every way.
The font in the brochure is very small and thin, but it's fully readable in the scan. And the color pictures are perfect, the colors are spot on, and I can see at least as much detail in shadow and highlights as I can on the original. (It seems it also adjusts contrast automatically.)


Here's a link to the PDF which the scanner made. 

*Though not successfully in this case, probably because the brochure is cut around the images, no straight edges. BTW, I like the medium grey it fills in the background, much better than black or white. 

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