Color Scanners Come Of Age

The Age

Tuesday January 14, 1997

GARRY BARKER

SCANNERS are the new hope of the hardware makers who are hustling to maintain revenue at a time when PC and printer sales seem to have hit a ceiling.

Growth of sales has been fostered partly by the popularity of the World Wide Web, but possibly more by the advent of cheap color printers and the desire of home and small business operators to stick a graphic or two into the "publications" they churn out of their word processors.

Capable low-end color scanners, bundled with software that makes it quite difficult to produce a really bad job, have become fairly plentiful, and their prices have been dropping. Two years ago, a useful machine might have cost $1500. Today, they're half that price.

Hewlett-Packard has just released the ScanJet 5p, which will retail here for $599, including sales tax. It replaces the ScanJet 4p in the company line-up and will be available for both Macintosh and Windows platforms.

The ScanJet 5p is a 24-bit color and 8-bit greyscale scanner working at 300dpi with 1200dpi available through software interpolation. A nice innovation is the front push-button panel allowing automatic launching of the scanning process using the bundled software. Users may alternatively use other software in the normal way.

Software on a bundled CD-ROM includes Adobe PhotoShop Limited Edition for the Macintosh version and Corel Photo-Paint Select for the Windows machines as well as PaperPort by Visioneer, which facilitates the organising, filing, faxing and editing of scanned documents. Also included is Caere OmniPage Lite, an OCR package, which allows scanned documents to be dumped straight into a word processor.

The disc includes an on-line tutorial and Hewlett-Packard's PictureScan 3.0 scanning program, which includes AccuPage for enhanced optical character recognition.

ScanJet Copy Utility allows color and greyscale copies of scanned documents to be printed on inkjet or laser machines. TWAIN and OLE-compliant applications are supported.

The machines handles A4 documents and copes with heavy books.