Nikon : Super Coolscan 2000 (LS-2000)

A flatbed scanner is usually slower than a glassless slide/negative scanner, though scanning speed tends to increase with scanner cost.   Prints take the least processing time on the flatbed, while transparency materials can twice as long or more,  depending on how much time must be devoted to adjusting the scan intensity.    Prints seldom need any compensation for scan intensity; glossy prints scan the best.   A flatbed with a transparency adapter can scan a variety of negative sizes up to 8" x 10", but any intermediate glass will somewhat limit resolution.   Images can be scanned in color or black and white.   Images are usually scanned into an image processing program, such as Corel Draw or Adobe Photoshop, which invoke the proprietary scanner program.  As a limiting feature, image processing is not available until the scanner mode is closed.  Several images can, however, be scanned in sequence and stacked for further processing.  

Agfa Scanner Product Family Overview

UMAX Scanner Products

Microtek 36-bit scanners

There are many image formats, including the raster formats BMP, gif, JPEG, and TIFF.  Scanned images can be stored in these and many other formats.  See Types and Formats for more details.

All graphics formats can be modified and even converted from one to another.  Nearly all pictures have some kind of a color balance or contrast and brightness problem.  Pictures that were scanned often are too blue, or red, or green and need modification.  Old slides may have similar, but more pronounced color shifts.   Possible image modifications and enhancements include cropping, resizing, sharpening, color correction, correction for contrast and brightness, and correction for hue and saturation.   Straight brightness and contrast correction is not recommended; rather, it is better use curves (such as in Photoshop) to alter half-tones and three-quarter-tones.  Unsharp masking is recommended over straight sharpening, since care must be taken not to sharpen noise.  Images for display are in RGB color mode, while press-ready images are in CMYK color mode.   CMYK mode can also be used to adjust flesh tones for proper balance.

Resizing can include the physical size, as well as the compressed size.  For raster graphics, physical resizing only works well downwards.  Any physical image enlargement really must be done at the time an image is scanned.

We are currently building and modifying web pages using MS Front Page 98 for the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)  and Adobe Photoshop 5.0 and Corel Draw 8 for images and graphics.  All these programs have good points, limitations, and advanced features that can take months (or even years) to learn.  Web page design can be simple or inordinately complex.  Many corporations have fancy pages that are over-designed, often referred to as web pages that suck.   Animated graphics and blinking text tend to be overused too.

Web pages need to strike a balance between images and text, and loading time and resolution.  The first page or home page should always be designed for fast loading.  There is a large amount of free graphics available on the internet for web pages; however, by copyright, these are for personal web pages and those of charitable organizations, not for commercial pages.

DC2120 is a legacy QIC80 tape format, which can now be written by very few but can be read by nearly any tape drive.  They feature space for 125 MB uncompressed or about 250 MB compressed data.  These tapes are now fairly inexpensive.

ZIP 100 disks are used in Iomega ZIP drives, which are available in external or internal models, using EIDE or SCSI interfaces.  Unfortunately, these disks are still fairly expensive at ten to fifteen dollars each.

Standard CD-ROM blanks have been dropping in price.  They hold 650 MB of information.  Not long ago, such a CD-ROM had to be written in one session, but they can now be incrementally written.  In incremental write mode, the same file can be written any number of times, but only the most-recent copy shows up in the directory.   Also, the directory order is descending, with the most-recently written files appearing first.

It is also possible to deliver images via email or posted to a website.   Once the total image size of an order is measured in four or more megabytes, neither of these methods is practical.  Besides the long transmission and read time, email is not a reliable method of transmitting images.  Images must be sent as attachments, but some servers damage attachments.   Website posting is more reliable, but large orders posted to a website would quickly consume all the available space on the server provided by the ISP.

APS (Advanced Photo System) is a new film size, slightly smaller than 35 mm.  Photographs can be taken in three different sizes, and much information can be recorded along with each picture.  However, only the better APS cameras actually take advantage of all the possible features.

New digital cameras have been appearing over the years.  They are evolving quickly, but none can really compete with 35 mm.  Digital cameras are very expensive,   have a short life-cycle, and quickly depreciate and become obsolete.

The easiest PC's to upgrade are those with generic desktop or tower cases.  Laptops are not easy to upgrade and nearly always contain proprietary components. Also, laptops often require the services of a factory-authorized technician.  Packard Bell PC's are among the most difficult to upgrade, and nearly all big name PC's contain some proprietary internal arrangement that impedes upgrading.  For more information, see Should I Buy A Clone?.

Officially, by I.R.S. standards, the computer life-cycle is five years for hardware and three years for software; however, it is actually 18 months or less. Computers are nearly obsolete as soon as they are put into use.  Many of the latest features can now be had by inexpensively swapping the motherboard and the CPU every two years or so.

Word processors such as MS-Word and Wordperfect can input images in a number of raster or vector formats.  Web-based graphics are not very diverse.  Currently, only two formats are used on web pages: JPEG and gif, though PNG files are coming.  JPEG files are essentially compressed BMP files.  The compression mode is lossy: information deemed unnecessary is discarded.  JPEG files come in variations, including normal, baseline, and progressive.   JPEG files are convenient, because they can save hard drive space; however, once read in, a JPEG files takes up space based on its uncompressed size.  Every program that can perform I/O on JPEG files seems to handle them slightly differently.  There are new programs to help JPEG processing by Digital Frontiers, Auto F/X , and Adobe ( ImageReady), but they do not eliminate trial and error entirely.  JPEG files can have any number of colors.

gif files are a special uncompressed format.  There are variations, which are not well documented in the programs that process them.  One interesting characteristic is the ability to have transparent gif's, where the background shows through the white space in the gif image.  gif files have a maximum of 256 colors.

For more information, see HTML Image Tips 1 or HTML Image Tips 2.