IDEAL Newsletter - Volume 1 Issue 1

The internet dominated many conversations at the Eastern Regional Reprographics Association (ERRA) trade show in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Reprographers from New England and even Michigan came to join about 250 other attendees at the October 15 - October 17, 1999 event. Because they are approaching the digital world with uncertainty and a need for clear answers, they have concerns about how they are going to transition form paper to digital and how are they going to make profits.

"Every time there has been a change in technology, IDEAL has always had the ability to rise to the occasion. ReproWEB is our answer to the challenge," said Jay Magenheim, President of IDEAL Scanners & Systems, Inc. IDEAL's ReproWEB allows documents to be easily uploaded, located, and then retrieved over the internet using a standard web browser from any PC, Mac, or UNIX computer.

There is a tremendous shift and opportunity for everybody with the new changes brought by the World Wide Web, said Magenheim. "The web is changing the way people are doing businesses. Any business with a stake in the future has to look at and redefine itself in terms of the web," said Magenheim. "We can do an on-line or in person demo of ReproWEB for organizations that have a need for many people to access and work with large documents."

ReproWEB supports thin-client viewing of documents on the server, in color or black & white, without a plug-in. This means that very large documents can be viewed by a user without downloading a very large file. CAD and graphic design files can either be fully shared as application files, or as print files, which allow designs to be viewed and printed without giving access to the "intelligent" design data. Because ReproWEB requires no client software other than a web browser, it is very easy to implement.

"We are at a critical point right now of making a shift in the company where for the last seven to nine years the primary focus has been in large-format scanners and then the application. I see a tremendous shift and opportunity now that there is new change upon us all of us with the World Wide Web. It's changing the way people are doing businesses. Any business with a stake in the future has to look at and redefine itself in terms of the web. The reprographic industry is no different. We have an opportunity to be part of that change and to make that change happen before it makes us change, and there's a difference there. Our objectives for the web must proceed at a faster pace than in the past. We, as I'm sure is the case with other companies in changing our culture, have to learn to live with and define ourselves by the web. ReproWEB is our solution."

Many of the ERRA Trade Show attendees are expanding their shop capabilities and do not currently have scanning or color scanning capabilities. Reprographers expressed that they want to add more capabilities to their inventory of capabilities.

Attendees were quite impressed with IDEAL's SuperWIDE scanner. Some had never seen a 50" large format scanner.

IDEAL can deliver what reprographers need, and can deliver at a price and in a method that is syncronized with the way their market will grow, says Jay Magenheim of IDEAL Scanners & Systems, Inc. IDEAL has the scanner hardware, software, and systems to satisfy all segments of the market. The equipment is sophisticated and cutting edge - and quick to learn and easy to operate.

The SuperWIDE Color Scanner is a full 50" wide, scans from 50 to 800 dpi resolution selectable in 1 dpi increments, and comes equipped with quadruple 5,400 CCD cameras. Front-loading handling allows for ease of use and it can even scane media up to 0.6" thick.

It supports 24 bit RGB Color, 8 bit and 4 bit Feature Extracted Color, 8 bit greytone, and black and white scanning. It also comes with JETimage software that performs image capture, color mapping, and color transfer directly to any standard MS Windows color inkjet plotter. Jus as importatn, the SuperWIDE supports closed-loop color calibration. Digital Signal Processing allows for fast Adaptive Area Thresholding in controller, Dual Ultrafast SCSI I/F. The SuperWIDE comes with IDEAL-CloudOS for scanning and single field indexing for monochrome applications and plotting to multiple Xerox 8825/8830s and Oce 9400s simultaneously and any other large format MS Windows plotter, User Manual, 8ft. power cord, and a 1 Year Return to IDEAL Warranty.

Sometimes we have received information that the quality of a copy made using the SuperWIDE50 and Coala is not satisfactory. We know that there were problems with the firmware on the first machines. But they have been debugged in the meantime.

To reach best results it is important to calibrate the SuperWIDE50 with Coala after a warming-up-period of approximately two hours.

Blueprints often have a yellow-toned background because they have been archived for a very long time. Normally the end-user wants to have a clear white background with sharp black lines. To get such results you should take the following:

2) If the result is not good you should increase the black point and decrease the white point.

3) Choose 'Map' in the printer menu and set the sharpness to 'low' or 'off'. You will now get a white background.

New printer drivers for COALA are now available

We have made the experience that colors change if the calibration is made before two hours have passed. For calibration scan the IT8-target with no b/w point, click in Coala menue: "Colormanagement" - "Create an ICM input profile" and then follow the instructions).

The Pre-Scan is not only a helpful function because Coala recognizes the format of the image automatically. Coala also calculates while pre-scanning a recommended black point and white point in order to create a good copy of your image at first shot.

There are several add-on modules for ScanDEX that enable users to manipulate the database. ScanDEX/QC is a network search, view, edit, and print module with a customizable front-end. With ScanDEX/OCR and Image Linking users can extract data from the document and enter it into the fields automatically. ScanDEX/CD allows users to export the archive or any part of to a CD-ROM with built-in viewer and search engine. ScanDEX/PLUS VIEW provides viewing and printing support for over 150 different file formats including AutoCAD and Microsoft Office.

Indexing is one of the most overlooked and difficult tasks in converting to a digital archive after the document has been scanned to raster. Without effective indexing, one has great difficulty in efficiently and quickly locating raster drawings. Up to now, the only possible way to create a manageable drawing database has been to scan the drawings in one process and then to index the drawings by hand; file by file. Manual indexing can be a tedious and time-consuming process.

ScanDEX from IDEAL Scanners & Systems, Inc. (IDEAL) can speed up the indexing process by automatically indexing scanned paper drawings or aperture cards. ScanDEX scans documents, indexes drawings, stores the indexed drawings in an ODBC-compliant database, and provides the tools to search, browse, edit, and track versions of the stored drawings. One unique feature is that ScanDEX performs the indexing and scanning in one process. With ScanDEX software, users only have to design a database structure defining the key fields relevant to their drawings and feed the drawings into the scanner. ScanDEX does the rest.

The ScanDEX Solution is a software/hardware system that includes either an IDEAL Large Format Scanner, or an IDEAL Aperture Card Scanner, or any small format office type scanner and the ScanDEX software. It creates large archives of images. Small ScanDEX databases can be used as "briefcases" containing sets of drawings. All supporting drawings and images for a project can be contained within one ScanDEX database.

Both vector and raster documents can be indexed into fully customizable and searchable ODBC-compliant database using ScanDEX. A database can contain a set of documents associated with a certain project, or could be an entire archive collection of all designs for your company. Any number of separate databases or individual "loose" documents can be stored and accessed.

ScanDEX does what it was designed to do says Mike Jordan of En-Sur Reprographics, a Youngstown, Ohio firm. "It gives our architects, surveyors, and engineers an easy way to find what they need on a CD or hard drive." En-Sur Reprographics discovered ScanDEX at a trade show where IDEAL exhibited and they have been using it for a little more than a year, with good results.

Once the drawings are scanned and indexed, they must be made easily accessible. IDEAL has a solution for this in its ReproWEB product. ReproWEB supports thin-client viewing of documents on the server, in color or black and white, without a plug-in. This means that very large documents can be viewed at the client without downloading a very large file. CAD and graphic design files can either be fully shared as application files, or as print files which allow your designs to be viewed and printed without giving access to sensitive "intelligent" design data. Because ReproWEB requires no client software other than a web browser, it is very easy to implement. Simply install new versions and upgrades one time at the server.

Using the new tools contained in IDEAL ScanDEX and ReproWEB, it is possible for remote cooperating clients to view organized sets of AutoCAD 2000 vector and raster drawings from anywhere in the world in a password-protected area of the Internet. Users can view, zoom, and browse vector or raster documents quickly without having to download the entire archive. Once required drawings are identified (either color or black and white), the client orders the documents by e-mail for editing, printing, and other forms of distribution.

ReproWEB and ScanDEX use Windows NT security, so administration is predictable and fully integrated into users' networks. Users can control which documents are accessible by Internet users and which documents only intranet and LAN users can access. File privileges can be assigned to users and groups. On-site LAN users as well as Internet users can utilize ReproWEB and ScanDEX to retrieve, view, and print documents from their desktops, all using a simple web interface. For more information about IDEAL products, visit www.ideal.com.

It is important in large format scanners that the scanner use apochromatic lenses, found in all IDEAL scanners, as described below. An apochromatic lens is designed to be free of both spherical and chromatic aberrations and will improve the resolution or lp/mm of scanned images.

Rays of light that pass through zones near its rim are not brought to focus at exactly the same point where rays that pass through the center of the lens. This imperfection is called spherical aberration andresults in a blurred image and a deterioration of the resolution of the lens if not corrected. This aberration is illustrated, exaggerated in figure 1. In the design of high quality lenses, spherical aberration can be reduced by proper choice of radii for the surfaces.

The color of the light will also have an effect on the position at which rays converge. Since the refractive index is greater for the violet end of the spectrum than for the red end, it follows from well known optical equations that the focal length will be less for violet than for red. Figure 2 shows a beam of white light incident upon a converging lens; every pencil of the beam will be dispersed like the two shown, and the collective effect will be the convergence of the several colors at individual points along the axis of the lens from the focus for violet light to the focus for red light. This dispersive effect produced by a lens is called chromatic aberration . In the design of high quality lenses to avoid dispersion it is necessary to combine two or more lenses so that the dispersion produced by each is annulled by the other. Such a combination is called an achromatic lens.

An apochromatic lens is designed to be free of both spherical and chromatic aberration. This is the type of lens used in all of IDEAL's line of large format scanners.

Advanced 2-D Adaptive Thresholding estimates the background gray level in a window area around each pixel. The difference between the actual pixel value and the background is then compared to the adaptive settings to determine if a pixel is thresholded as a black or a white pixel.

A bitmapped image is a computer file representing a line-art image that was scanned with a scanner. Refers to the pattern (map) of bits that are either black or white.

Charge Coupled Device, CCD is the image sensor in the scanner that converts light to voltages. These voltages are converted by the scanner into the image.

Standard runlength compression format used with FAX transmission. It utilizes modified Huffman coding to further compress the runlength numbers. Most scanner file formats are dialects of this format.

Two-dimensional compression format, giving very compact image files. Standardized by CALS (MIL 28002) and ISO-ODA for Drawing Archival and Interchange.

The simplest pixel has two options: black or white. (A pixel with two choices is known as a 1-bit image, or two raised to the power of one). Adding more bit information increases the number of color options. The number of potential color options for a pixel is called color bit depth. For example a 4-bit pixel would have 16 color options, and an 8-bit pixel would have 256 color options, while a 24-bit pixel would have 16,777,216 color options.

A color space is a particular language used to describe color. Examples of color spaces are: RGB, CMYK, HSV, CIE LAB.

Reducing file sizes of images by encoding the data

Dots Per Inch, equivalent to Pixels Per Inch. An expression of resolution of a scanned image.

Digital Signal Processor, does image enhancement in real-time while scanning.

Indexed color (or pseudo-color) is the provision of a relatively small number, say 256, of discrete colors in a colormap or palette. For each pixel in the image, the index number of a color is then stored. When retrieving the image, a lookup table uses the index to retrieve red, green and blue components that are then sent to the display. In graphic file formats such as PCX of TIFF, an indexed color image is accompanied by its colormap.

Inkjet printers transfer color to a page by squirting cyan, magenta, yellow and black liquid ink onto the page. The ink dries on the paper through evaporation.

Using the interpolation method of resampling generates values for points in between the actual pixels by looking at the surrounding colors or intensities. In a scanner resolution is increased beyond the actual number of CCD cells. As each line of pixel data arrives from the cameras, new interpolated pixels are added between original pixels. The added pixels enhance line edge definition.

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