File scanning on the Alps - Hardware Review - PSX300g page scanner from Alps America - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1992 by Cliff Roth

FINE SCANNING ON THE ALPS

Alps PSX300g Page Scanner

Rating:***

AT A GLANCE: High-quality HP ScanJet Plus-compatible flatbed gray-scale scanner that reproduces pages up to 8.5 by 14 inches.

DOCUMENTATION: Biggest problem with this system. Needs work if beginners are to feel comfortable.

SETUP: Moderately difficult; requires experience.

EASE OF USE: Easy, after successful installation.

SUPPORT: Toll-free: available for 30 days.

LIST PRICE: $1,795 with software ($1,495 without Image-In and Perceive)

STREET PRICE RANGE: $1,550-$1,700

MANUFACTURER: Alps America; 3553 North 1st St., San Jose, CA 95134; (408) 432-6000, (800) 825-2577

SOFTWARE INCLUDED: Image-In, Perceive, and Alps Driver

DIMENSIONS: 21.3 by 12.9 by 4.55 inches

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: 2MB IBM-compatible computer (4MB recommended); hard-disk drive; VGA; DOS 3.1 and Windows 3.0 or higher

INTERFACE: SCSI host adapter board, supplied

WARRANTY: One year

The Alps PSX300g full-page scanner looks sleek and simple--its only hardware control is an on-off switch. After installation, the scanner is fully controlled by the supplied software. It reverts to a sleep mode, shutting off the flatbed scanner's photocopy-type light when it hasn't been used for several minutes.

Installing the Alps Scanner requires plugging in a supplied SCSI interface controller board in an available slot, and this initial setup procedure caused problems with my fully loaded 386 clone until I tried switching the board's interrupt (IRQ) address jumper from the default to another choice and disconnecting the terminator that the instructions insist must be connected. The scanner itself and the interface board have separate instructions and, during the two hours or so it took to figure out what was wrong, they seemed to engage me in a vicious cycle-- each manual referring to the other. This lapse in documentation is my only real complaint about the scanner. Once it was properly installed, its performance was excellent.

You know that the hardware installation is successful when the scanner's software driver loads properly at boot-up time. You should have an ASCII editor available to modify your computer's CONFIG.SYS file--a minor task for experienced users, but a potentially intimidating one for neophytes. It would be nice if the Alps installation procedure automatically modified the CONFIG.SYS for you.

Once it's finally installed... The PSX300g comes supplied with Image-In software, which installs easily in Windows and provides powerful image-manipulation features. Before scanning an image, you can specify line art, gray scale, or halftone conversion in any resolution up to 300 dpi (there is also a driver that lets you get 600-dpi resolution), as well as the scale of the image. As you change these parameters, the program instantly tells you how much memory will be required. Large, high-resolution images exceeded my computer's 4MB of RAM, but by making appropriate adjustments I could scan in anything I wanted. (Alps recommends 4MB and says 2MB is the absolute minimum, along with 7MB of available hard-disk space. If you need to do mostly high-resolution scanning, 2MB isn't going to cut it, however.)

Scanned images can be stored as TIF, PCX, TGA, BMP, MSP, GIE PNT, EPS, or RAW files, making the system compatible with practically any desktop publishing or multimedia application on the market. When storing images, data compression is available, but I found it painfully slow on my 25MHz SX machine--it took over two minutes to save a single full-page image this way, and several minutes to read it. Storing the same 8.5-by-1 1-inch image in uncompressed form took 45 seconds. The program provides comprehensive information about files that have been stored. For example, a halftone file I used for this test, at 207-dpi resolution, resulted in an image measuring 1,711 pixels wide by 2,275 pixels high, and took up 3.3MB in compressed TIF form, 3.gMB when uncompressed. The Image-In scan and paint software can also convert between Macintosh and IBM file formats. This is a plus, since desktop publishers and designers often have to work with both operating systems.

Image and text manipulation. The Alps scanner package also includes Perceive software, from Ocron, for optical character recognition. Although OCR programs are notorious gulpers of hard-disk space, Perceive fits in a relatively humble 1MB, installs in a jiffy, and does a reasonably good job of converting scanned text into data--that is, about as good as other OCR programs, which is somewhere around 95 to 99 percent accuracy. Perceive is startlingly intelligent, but not perfect. Its easy-to-use features include an Auto-Zone option, which recognizes boundaries between columns of text, and the ability to specify the sequence that multiple areas of the scanned page are converted in. Minor complaints include the inability to close a converted text file without saving it or exiting the program. A page of typed text took about a minute to convert on my 25-MHz 386SX. The text can be stored as an ASCII, ANSI, WordPerfect 5.0, or WordStar 5.0 file.