At 09:04 PM 2/12/99 -0800, you wrote:
>From: Jamie Furtner <[log in to unmask]>
>At 09:22 PM 99-02-12 -0500, you wrote:
>>
>>OK, now is it really easy to use?  You said it was easily installed
>>and that
>>is great news.  Just need to be sure that it is not complicated to
>>use.
>>Susan Hays

>are few or no written manuals -- they are on the CDs. The scanning
>engine itself will take a bit of getting used to, but I have found it
>to be extremely powerful to adjust settings once you understand it. I
>recommend checking out www.scantips.com for information about
>scanners in general, various settings, resolutions, and more.
>
The process of scanning anything is still an art that takes some practice
to get good results.  There are many factors that determine the quality of
your scans - resolution, material being scanned, what you intend to do with
the scan (print, display on monitor only, etc).

The resolution you use is perhaps the most important and most
misunderstood.  Many lower-cost scanner ads will talk about 1200 or 2400
Dots Per Inch resolution.  Almost always this is "software enhanced" and
the true scanning resolution is more like 300 DPI maximum.  This is not as
big a problem as it may sound.  Your monitor's resolution is only about
70-90 DPI.  If you are scanning for display on a monitor, then 100-200 is
probably enough.  If you are scanning documents for OCR conversions, 200
DPI is plenty.  It will create a file that is not too large in a shorter
but still has enough detail for the OCR program to work accurately.

The biggest problem people have when first starting out is cranking the
scanner resolution up to 1200 DPI and getting a HUGE file that is unusable.
 Let's do a little math and see why.  You scan a 3" high by 4" wide
photograph at 1200DPI.  This means that the scanned image will be 3600 dots
high by 4800 dots wide.  Let's say you use a screen resolution of 800
(wide) by 600 (high) pixels and your monitor measures 8" high by 11" wide.
This means that your monitor is roughly 72-75 DPI in either direction.
When you display a 3600 dot by 4800 dot image on a screen of only 75 DPI,
the apparent dimensions of the image are about 48" high and 64" wide.  You
are only going to see a very small fraction of the image on your monitor.

A similar problem happens to first time users of paint programs.  This also
applies to printing scanned images.  They will create a drawing about 4"
square on their screen but when they print it, they only get an image about
1" square and can't understand why.

You should practice with different resolutions on different kinds of
material - photographs are pretty easy to work with while magazine and
newspaper pictures are much more difficult to work with.  It's not really
difficult to do but it does take practice to see what works.

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