Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 00:55:17 -0700 From: Kent Stewart <kstewart@3-cities.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Opinions on HP ScanJet 5P, please Message-ID: <37957CE5.8B5A0CAF@3-cities.com> References: <19990721110220.A91000@freebie.lemis.com>
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Greg Lehey wrote: > > I've just been offered an HP ScanJet 5P second hand for about $150. > Is this a good deal? Any war stories? I went to look it up and none of my catalogs show it. Since someone is offering it to you, I would assume it is scsi. I don't remember the 5p being a flatbed scanner and that is why I pulled out the catalogs. You do presentations and being able to scan a transparency could be important. The newer scanner are not that expensive and they do amazing things. When it comes to software, the afordable, amazing programs only run on Mac's or Window's machines. Scanning is like photography in that part of the process involves some form of magic. The magic occurs in the darkroom for the photograph but it is the image programs that performs the magic on a scanner. They can take a crummy photograph and crank brightness, contrast, and tint to the point where the image sparkles. The hardware is only half of the package. HP scanner software packages are not really notable because you seem to get the light variety of someone elses image software and you still have to purchase the real thing. Their packages are as good as any of the others I have payed attention to. You don't get Adobe's or Corel's best image program in a scanner package that costs less than they sell upgrades for. For simple scanning you probably can't tell the difference between any of them. If you want to scan an old manual and OCR, now you need all of the magic you can handle. I use Xerox's Pagis Pro. I have more expensive programs but is as easy to use as any of them. The problem is when their choice of contrast doesn't provide a good image to OCR. The, you need knobs to twist and only some of them such as the Xerox program let you do that. We went from 50% recognition to almost a 100% by adjusting brightness and contrast when we scanned some old computer runs. We had to scan to a file and then start the OCR program and feed a file to it. You wouldn't convert many pages this way before you gave up. Kent > > Greg > -- > See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers > finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA mailto:kstewart@3-cities.com http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/index.html To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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