Tag Archives | TWAIN

Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Review

By on July 24, 2009 in Technology

Fujitsu-ScanSnap-S510-Duplex-ScannerThe Fujitsu Scansnap S510 is a dedicated duplex document scanner, built on top of the successful Scansnap S500. The S510 retains all of its predecessor’s strengths, and improves its offering in key areas, especially speed. I’m not aware of a scanner that come close to beating the S510 in terms of performance, with its 50 sheet automatic document feeder with automatic duplex scanning, and an impressive speed of 18 pages per minute. It’s worth reiterating – this isn’t a flatbed, if you need a more versatile scanner, you could try the Canon CanoScan 8800F.

The S510 is not without its problems, however. The scanner ships with an impressive software bundle, but the lack of TWAIN and WIA drivers means that you either like the software bundle it comes with, or you lump it. I’m not sure of Fujitsu’s logic, but the Scansnaps will not work  with other software applications (like Home Document Manager, OneNote etc). This isn’t Fujitsu’s policy across their entire scanner range, but it does seem to be the case across all Scansnaps.

Technologically, the scanner is sound. But it is let down by the fact that you have work work the way they want you to work, rather than how you want to work. The software bundled also boasts the ability to output the scanned documents directly to Word or Excel files. Whilst this sounds good in theory, the resulting documents contain so many errors that it ends up being frustrating rather than useful.  There are also many reports of users failing to get the scanner to work on Vista 64 bit, which, again, is a glaring hole.

All in all, I’d have to give it 3 out of 5. It would have scored higher, but restricting users to a particular way of working is not acceptable. We paperless enthusiasts take our systems very seriously, and who are Fujitsu to say they know better.

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Ne'er the TWAIN shall meet

By on June 22, 2009 in News
Flat-bed Scanner.
Image via Wikipedia

Like Wellington facing his old foe at Waterloo, this weekend I did laborious battle with the TWAIN specification and the scanner manufacturers determined to pervert it.

TWAIN is a standard that allows software programs to talk to image acquisition devices (scanners to you and me) in a common way. Although capitalized, TWAIN isn’t actually an acronym, and comes from Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West” – “…and never the twain shall meet…”, and reflected the difficulties at the time of connecting scanners and computers. Although a later attempt to create an expansion of “TWAIN” failed, “Technology Without An Interesting Name” is still well remembered.

One of the challenges of developing software that makes use of scanners is that scanner manufacturers, for whatever reason, seem to be very bad at actually following the standard. In my office for example, I have a  Brother MFC-7820N. It’s not bad, it has served me well over the last few years, but – the driver, as released by Brother, tells lies. I ask it what image formats it supports, and it lies. So I find myself continually relying on TWAIN less and less, and doing more and more in the application.

Today’s update (version 1.2009.6.4) is essentially a big step forward in scanner compatibility. Any problems you encounter, be sure to let me know. As usual, no action is required on your part, Home Document Manager will update itself whenever an Internet connection is present.

As an aside – if you’re on Twitter, I’d love to hear from you – http://twitter.com/documentmanager

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Inbuilt Scanning Has Arrived!

By on March 9, 2009 in News

Welcome to the Monday update!

It’s been a pretty full week, and today’s update is probably the most significant since Home Document Manager’s launch.

What’s new? Well…scanning’s new. As of today, you can scan directly into Home Document Manager using any TWAIN or WIA compatible scanner – if you don’t know what that means you can safely ignore this sentence. You can now scan in single 1-page documents in a flatbed or multiple 1-page documents and multi-page documents using the document feeder.

There are a couple of wrinkles in the scanning of multiple pages into a multi-page PDF file, but these seem to be driver specific and I’ll be working to iron these out over the next week.

Here’s what it looks like – To start with, there is new section in the main ribbon of the application for scanning related activities:

New menu items

New menu items

The new commands are Select Scanner, Single Page Document Scan, and Multi-page Document Scan.

Select Scanner allows you to choose which of the image acquisition devices attached to your computer you wish to use. If you don’t choose a device, the default device for your system is used. On my system, it presents me with the following choices:

Select image acquisition source.

Select image acquisition source.

Single Page Document Scan is ideal if you want to scan only a subsection of a page using the flatbed, or have a collection of single page documents and want to import them quickly using the document feeder. When you click import, you’re asked to provide a useful name for your document, this doesn’t impact the built in search functionality, but it does make a document more instantly recognisable in the document list.

A useful name for your document

A useful name for your document

After you’ve entered a useful name, or accepted the default, you’re presented with the scanning dialog on which you can adjust various properties of the scan, ranging from DPI (dots per inch, or image quality) to color, even which part of an image is captured.

The Scanning Dialog

The Scanning Dialog

If you’re using the flatbed, clicking ‘Preview‘ allows you to preview the document and adjust which part is captured, if necessary. For example:

Select An Area To Scan

Select An Area To Scan

Here, we can see the selection rectangle has been reduced to minimise the amount of empty white space in the scanned document. Clicking “Adjust the quality of the scanned picture” presents the following dialog:

Scanning Properties

Scanning Properties

allowing you to alter brightness, contrast, color and image quality. Finding the optimal properties will be something of an art, depending on your scanner and the types of documents you’re importing.

The process for Multi-page Document Scan is the same. Using the document feeder, load in the pages for the multi-page document, they are each scanned in turn and compiled into a single multi-page PDF file. The document is then imported as usual.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback over the last week. With such a significant chunk of functionality going in today, your feedback will be crucial in ironing out any wrinkles. As usual, there is no action required on your part tu upgrade – Home Document Manager will quietly install the update when there is a connection to the Internet.

Happy shredding!

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