Scanning the Canon CanoScan LiDE 20 - Test Scans
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When the “Scan” button is pushed using the settings I mentioned, the general ToolBox will cause the scanner to scan what’s on the platen, send it to your computer, and automatically startup Photoshop with the picture opened and ready to be edited. Once you have it set up the way you want it can really save a lot of time. Speaking of time, as you can see I have it set to scan at the maximum 600dpi. It took about one minute to scan completely. It scans in a quiet manner save for the little grind it makes once the scanning is over. Below you can see the image produced from having the scanner set to 600dpi and then resizing it, so it doesn’t take up the whole screen here.
It’s not terrible, but it is quite blurry; when it comes down to it, that’s all that matters. I was really disappointed by the quality of this scanner. I know it only costs $50, but it just isn’t as clear as I would expect it to be. All of the great design features and the software are nice, but the quality of the scans is what’s really important.
Actually, before I got that scan I accidentally hit the “Copy” button. That bypassed my computer and the whole editing process. You hit the button, it scans using whatever settings you have configured, and then sends it to your printer. Here is the result of that accident.
Again I was disappointed in the quality. If I had used photopaper it may have turned out a bit better, though not much. As you can see the faces are almost too faint to see and the flowers next to us are just blotches of color.
On to the last feature, the included Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Using this software you can scan a document such as a book or magazine, turn the characters on the scanned image into text again, and then you can edit the text in your favorite word processing program. Take a look below at some text I got using the scanner and the OCR software on a Rolling Stone magazine article about iPods:
With the exception of the obvious mistake in the first couple of words where it changed what should have been 130,000 to ‘J30,000 and in the last sentence it forgot a space between the words “a” and “Web”, I’d say this software works pretty well. (That huge “A” in the beginning is supposed to be like that.)
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