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When a business decides to switch over to document scanning there are many things that should be taken into account. With the advancement of technology, old documents, images, text files and many more can be retrieved, recovered and archived now, which was once found impossible. With the inclusion of computer appliances and document management, accessibility has become very easy and has changed the whole process of office running. The actual definition of document scanning is the transfer of the document in paper form into an electronic form. The record gets transferred into the digital data and is easily accessable for the employees as well as the employer. It increases the transparency between employer and employee, along with the customers too.
Electronic storage of data saves time and money, and if maintained, it will be useful and affordable in the long run. The document scanning businesses charge on per page basis. This cost might vary if your business documents include a large number of pages, the document scanning company is willing to negotiate and/or consider long term business relationship. There are lots of advantages in document scanning and the most remarkable one is that important or old documents can be saved kept for very long period of time without any damage.
Businesses that have a small staff, or simply do not want the employees’ time taken up doing scanning (scanning is a very time-consuming process), can get the document scanning done outside. But if lots of documents need to be scanned continually, and you have no way of passing on the cost to the clients, then it is advisable to have the tools needed for scanning in your office.
First of all, you will need a computer that has a document scanning system because this will prove to be much cheaper than other computer systems. It should be capable of producing clear images and capture any detail, even if it is minute, and produce it clearly on the scanned document. These days, document scanning is widely used whether the business is small or large. This is because of its affordability and easy access. It also retrieves the old documents and saves it for longer period of time.
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What sort of things one should keep in mind before buying a Scanner?
a.) Prints: This is easy; just get the cheapest flatbed scanner, and if for good quality, just pick up the cheapest EPSON Printer. Even the cheapest flatbeds offer FOUR times the resolution that one requires.
b.) 35mm Slides and/or B/W Negatives: It is better to go in for a real film scanner if the need arises.
c.) Medium Format Transparencies and/or B/W Negatives: The best buy is $3,000 film scanner like Minolta Multi PRO or a good flatbed like the EPSON 4990.
d.) 4×5″ Film: 4 x 5 desktop film scanners are out there today in the market. It is better to buy a good flatbed like the EPSON 4990 or Microtek 1800f.
Keep the images and file sizes down, with any scanner resolution. In fact, it is better to turn down the resolution of any scanner to keep the resolution low enough to make emailing possible, and to keep the image small enough to fit on a computer screen. Honestly, if internet and email is the need of the hour then a flatbed scanner is fine.
Printing on paper is more difficult. If the print is 8 x 10″ or bigger getting the highest resolution a dedicated film scanner is possible. Flatbed scanners are poor for printing from 35mm film, although great for scanning one-hour lab prints.
Tip #1: Choose a Good Photo
As an example, the best photos are with the dog standing in full or 3/4 profile. The photo should exhibit good color and strong contrast. Contrast is important - particularly contrast with the background - if the dog blends into the background all anyone will see is a blob. This is especially important with blues and blacks. Blues and blacks almost always look best in photos taken in strong sunlight with light-colored backgrounds.
Tip #2: Use a Good Scanner
Many scanners, particularly cheap ones, will ruin just about any photo. For as little as $150 it is better to buy a top rated scanner like the Epson 1240U.
Tip #3: Ignore “scan for the web options”
It is better to avoid “scan for the web” options in the scanner so that options such as enlarging color correcting, and so forth, can be utilized.
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Check each image for horizontal alignment. The easiest way to do this is to set a horizontal guide by dragging one out of the top ruler. Place the guide right at one of the baselines shown in the image. If the baseline is not absolutely aligned with the guide, it is better to use the rotate image command to fix it. Preferably it is better to use numerical rotations (e.g., 0.7° counter-clockwise) with a lot of trial and error
Adjust the levels of the black channel. The end goal is to get an image that has a completely white background, and very black letters. Consult the documentation for details regarding how to adjust levels for different versions of Photoshop.
- Try automatic adjustment of levels first. This will, frankly, rarely suffice.
- Adjust the left and right sliders to get a nice, clean background (without a lot of gray noise) and strong, clear letters.
Adjust the middle slider (the mid-range) to set how heavy the letters appear. The adjustment of this slider (in combination with the left and right ones) can affect whether the font ends up having a light, regular, or semi-bold weight. It can also affect how sharp corners become—heavy, black scans tend to have more rounded edges.
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Prepare the image for scanning.
- If at all possible, avoid using originals less than 0.25″ high.
- When possible, use samples that include the letters on either side of the target letter as a guide to spacing.
- For letters from rough-and-ready sources (e.g. printed books), choose several different instances of each letter. Scan each of them, and then assemble a consistent alphabet using the best. The smaller the original letters, the more scans are needed.
- If the source image is a drawing or calligraphy, add at least two horizontal lines (typically baseline and x-height). This will make it easier to align the image after scanning, and keep scaling consistent.
Put the original drawing as straight as possible on the scanner plate. Later check to be sure that the scan is aligned.
For ease, scan using a Photoshop plug-in, not the standalone scanner software. Adjust the image in Photoshop later.
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Blowback is the practice of printing electronic documents to paper (blowing them back to tangible form). The typical scenario is when hardcopy documents are scanned, but then hard copies of the scanned electronic documents are needed.
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There are different levels of service and pricing when scanning is needed. Here are some brief details to help clients understand the scanning processes:
Straight Run Auto Feed- Originals that are rubber-banded or loose documents. This type of work does not require any preparation by the operator to being scanned. The orginals must be in excellent condition (one-sided, same size with no staples, clips, tabs or folders).
Light Litigation- Originals that are thick stapled and clipped sections of documents. Occasionally, small sections of stapled or clipped documents of only a few pages may be mixed in, but not to the extent of slowing the output of the scanning. This category includes originals that are all 2-sided, even if considered “auto-feed”.
Medium Litigation- Originals that are primarily stapled and clipped sections of both letter and legal size documents, including file folders, folder tabs, numeric and alpha tabs, which are to be scanned. These jobs require more handing and organization. Occasionally, small receipts or smaller-sized originals may be mixed in, but not to the extent of slowing the out put of the job.
Heavy Litigation- Originals described as “Medium Litigation”, but with fewer pages in the stapled or clipped sections (5 pages or less), mixed sizes of originals, such as receipts, envelopes, half pages, and poor contrast documents that will require adjustment to product an acceptable scanned image. Included in this are documents marked, “Scan Tagged or Clipped Documents Only”.
Hand on Glass- Originals require that the operator place the documents directly on the scanner glass for scanning more than 50% of the time. Extremely poor quality originals, receipts, checks, etc., that require extensive handling and analysis on a page-by-page basis in order to produce a quality image.
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It is very common for an attorney or legal client to make a request regarding Concordance or Summation. This request is usually part of a project that would possibly entail scanning, Bates labeling, indexing, image conversion, etc. A common example would be a paralegal requesting to have legal documents picked up, scanned, electronically Bates labeled (i.e. BS001-BS1001) and brought back on a CD/DVD in a Concordance (or Summation) format.
Concordance and Summation (http://law.lexisnexis.com/concordance and http://www.summation.com/) are proprietary softwares to the legal industry that allow a firm’s staff to organize case files in an electronic format. Hence, legal firms will request one of the two formats, so that they can automatically load the electronic images in the database. That is to say, if they own one of these software packages.
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ProjectCenter recently had a common client project where color images were to be scanned to a digital format, image-keyed, and given back to the client in a specified format. The hard copy images were scanned into a PDF digtal format.
Unfortunately, there arose an issue where eScanIT would not recognize a great portion (98%) of the images brought into the program. eScan IT would pick 2 random pages and key them, but leave the rest unrecognized. This was the only occurance experienced.
The solution to this issue was to simply convert the PDF files to individual TIFFs. Once that was completed, the IPRO eScan-IT program was able to recognize all the images.
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www.IHeartPrint.com just made mention (http://www.iheartprint.com/2008/01/03/lang_en-my-5-print-related-thoughts-for-2008-lang_en/) of ProjectCenter’s blog (projectcenter.wordpress.com), saying that that companies like ProjectCenter “are proving that it’s worth [it] to share knowledge and engage conversations”.
ProjectCenter would like to thank www.IHeartPrint.com for this compliment.
We would also like to thank others (i.e. www.unioncopy.com) that have been sharing our posts to the public. We really appreciate your help.
As always, we greatly welcome your comments on our blog, and hope you will take the time to do so.
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