Scanner boards are not sexy. Most people don't spend time thinking about them. But a good scanner interface board is key to high-speed scanning.
High-speed scanners are very impressive. They shoot paper through their rollers and whip out captured images. Behind the scenes, deep inside the CPU, you'll usually find a hardworking, intelligent scanner interface board masterminding the operation.
As the scanner moves the paper and captures images, the board receives the images, rotates them, cleans them up and enhances them to make text and pictures clearer, compress the images and present the final product to the scanning software. It directs the scanner, fixes images, moves them and reduces the work your PC has to do.
Things to look for in a scanner interface board include:
1. High speeds. Make sure the board is as fast as your scanner. If your scanner can scan 400 images a minute duplex, the board should be able to at least keep up with it.
2. Processing power. Boards run a gamut from basic SCSI cards to very powerful image processors. You may want a board that does image processing and delivers a final product to the PC the scanner is connected to. You may want the board to send all the image processing work to the software on your PC. Powerful boards are expensive, but they save you having to buy a high-speed computer. To process high-speed images in software, you need at least a 200 mhz Pentium Pro.
3. Duplex support. Some boards support duplex scanning. Others require two boards and use two slots in your PC. Take that cost into account if you're planning to scan duplex pages.
4. Easy integration into scanning software. Scanner interface boards come with drivers. Your scanning software application needs to talk to these drivers. J&K Imaging and Kofax use ActiveX controls in their drivers. This makes it easy for programmers to write interfaces to the drivers. ActiveX controls prepare the scanning application to work with Internet and Windows NT applications.
5. Viewing during scanning. Boards capable of flashing images on the screen as the paper's being scanned help the operator perform quality control on the images as they scan.
6. Memory. The board needs memory to buffer images. Having at least 16 megs on the board is useful. If it's not there, make sure you can add it.
7. Grayscale or color output. Some scanner boards collect eight bits or more information on each pixel and use grayscale or color information to enhance the image before outputting a bitonal scan.
A few boards actually output grayscale or color images. This creates bigger files and can slow down the scanning. Some boards can maintain production speed in grayscale. Grayscale or color is important in applications like passport photos, airplane tickets and documents that contain barcodes as well as text.
Blueridge Technologies (Flint Hill, VA 540-675-3015) offers the PCI Lightning board ($1,100). It works with PCI buses on PCs, Macs and Power Macs. It can scan 100 pages a minute. It lets the CPU compress and store scanned documents as the scanner processes documents. This board uses the Fujitsu RS232/video scanner interface specification.
Dunord's (Montreal, Canada 514-384-3123) $1,600+ I-3000 board scans up to 370 images a minute. It works with a PCI bus. Its data transfer rate is 133 megabits per second. Rotate images 90, 180 or 270 degrees on the fly. Take advantage of the faster speeds of landscape scanning.
This board captures grayscale images at 30 pages a minute using a 133 mhz Pentium with an IDE hard drive. It offers TwinStream technology that outputs grayscale and binary versions of images simultaneously. Dunord's $2,000 Virtual Image Rendition software works with it to work out what parts of a document to output in grayscale and what to leave in bitonal.
Image Access' (Boca Raton, FL 561-995-8334) HiSCAN card ($600-$2,500) is a PCI bus card for scanners that scan 20 to 200 pages per minute.
The HiSCAN rotates images as they're scanned so that you can scan in landscape mode. It can control duplex scanners with one card. The included HiSCAN software consists of DLLs and EXE programs. It supports Windows 95, NT and OS/2.
J&K Imaging (Atlanta, GA 770-984-1212) offers two boards. The $780+ DDU is for desktop scanners, like Canons and Panasonics. It scans up to 60 images a minute.
The $4,900 DPU 16/32 Image Processing Board handles up to 500 images a minute. It comes with 32 megs of memory. It supports duplex scanning on one board. It comes with a high-resolution graphic interface that presents scanned images on your monitor as they're scanned. Both boards come with ActiveX drivers.
Kofax's (Irvine, CA 714-727-1733) family of 32-bit, RISC-based Adrenaline boards ($1,500+) perform forms processing, page registration, image enhancement and image compression while driving high-speed document scanners at up to 200 ppm.
The Adrenaline boards offer "load-balancing." They balance work between the board and the CPU. The software driver looks at your scanning application and decides which jobs are best done by the board and which by the CPU.
The boards support network printing up to 25 ppm. Their image cleanup and repair duties include black border removal, deskew, line removal, deshade, destreak, despeckle, edge enhancement and character repair. They come in video and SCSI models and they work with 32-bit PCI buses.
Xionics' (Burlington, MA 617-229-7000) cards work with Xionics' page separators to define the start and end of batches. They recognize barcodes and patch codes and automatically identify and index documents. They deskew, remove noise and lines.
The $5,000 Turbo card scans up to 100 pages a minute. It compresses files using CCITT. The card can scan, compress and write an image to disk while simultaneously scaling and displaying the image. Pipelining lets Turbo compress and write an image to disk while the page is still being scanned. Memory can be expanded from four megs to 24 megs.
The company's $900 PowerLightning PC cards scan up to 100 pages a minute. They also decompress, scale and display stored images in under a second. PowerLightning/SCSI has a SCSI-2 interface. It drives 10 to 40 ppm scanners. PowerLightning/SP works with low-cost desktop simplex and duplex video interface scanners from Panasonic and Bell+Howell.
PowerLightning/Pro is a high-performance accelerator for single-sided scanning video interface peripherals from Bell+Howell, Ricoh and Hitachi. PowerLightning/Dual is a single card duplex scanning solution that works with the Fujitsu M3099A and the IS520 from Ricoh.
