Have and interesting question about scanners.....

[RAMWolff44]

It was very noisy and the software sucked, big time. I do not like Epson for anything and will stay away from that company from here on out. I am told there high end stuff (esp. the printers) are really good, but anything under $200.00 from Epson is low end technology, and I believe it.

I know it's not what you wanted to hear and I'm sorry about that, but I have not had ANY luck with Epson products, period.

I like HP and Cannon for printers (I'm looking int the new Cannon printer, it has seperate ink wells (6 to be exact) and a microdrop technology and I've had the opportunity to test drive one and was quite impressed with it, plus the ink is waterproof and very affordable. BUT I'm still not sure about the scanners. I'm still researching it. Agfa was the best and it still is. I just wish they continued making them for comsumers. They are only producing high end equipment and services for the time being, guess that's because of the economy, can't blame them. So I am sticking with my older Agfa 1212u, it still works better than anything else I've tried so far.

Good luck to you [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

RAMWolff [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[This message was edited by RAMWolff on April 04, 2002 at 21:58.]

[raffon]

I have an old HP IIcx which I paid about $900 for back in '94. Still works great except one side of the lamp is starting to dim. I also use a HP 5p that came from work. Not a cheap model either. It does a very good job also and is at least 3 years old. Both are SCSI, which ups the price but if you are scanning alot, a higher priced unit will save you $$ in the long run because it will last longer, is faster and usually doesn't need support. Look on ebay or in the paper (paper??? What's that??) for a good used high end scanner, you might be pleasently suprised.

Just my $.02

Ich bin ein New Yorker

[Peter Clifton]

RAMWolff
I don't think the results would be that good.

GIF only supports 256 colours, so it probably would not be a good idea to scan images at this colour depth.

This leaves TIFF and PNG, the edges of such photo's would not be sharp enough to get accurate masks.

If such a cure all existed it would have been in packages like Photoshop long ago.

Most users working practices in my experience, involve getting the image at the required resolution with the best colour reproduction into a bitmap editor as quick as possible.

It is here that masking should be carried out, why increase the complexity of the scanning process, to get what I imagine would be dubious results at best.

It is not exactly difficult if the background is relatively pure to

1. Down sample bitmap to 256 colours if required.
2. use the magic wand tool.
3. shape mask by selecting similar.
4. Safe GIF with 1 bit mask.

or if 24/32 bit colour images

1. Use magic wand tool.
2. Shape mask by selecting similar.
3. Feather mask in by a few pixels.
4. Save image with Alpha channel.

Photoshop probably has the best default masking tools of any bitmap package.

If you do a lot of masking then it might be worth investing in a dedicated plug-in for this task.

HTH

Peter

The style challenged Pete'sCrypt

[BobInce]

As far as I can imagine, to only way for a scanner to be able to capture something with true transparency would be to scan once, then change the background (eg. make it reflective/non-reflective, or turn a backlight on/off) and scan again. By comparing the two captured images an alpha channel could be constructed and an attempt at colour correction made on semi-opaque pixels.

If such a piece of hardware exists, I have never heard of it! Might be an interesting project to build one.

I guess you could have a go yourself by putting a white and black background behind an object, scanning it twice, and doing the image calculation manually (it's probably possible using some channel ops). But I don't know if you'd be able to get enough accuracy; any slight movement of the scanned object between scan passes would ruin the results.

[raffon]

As I keep searching for a replacement bulb for my HP Scanjet IIcx, look what I found:

http://www.printerworks.com/Sales/Sc...anjetIIcx.html

These are refurbished IIcx Scanners, which were about $1000 new back when. They also have a 14 inch bed. For $99 plus shipping not a bad deal. You would also need a SCSI adpater but they are cheap too. HP has the twain drivers and Scanjet2 software on their site also, so installing is no problem.

Ich bin ein New Yorker