High-Quality Scanning in New York City

May 8, 2009 8:29 PM

Where can I have a hardcopy document "professionally" scanned in New York City? I have a twenty-page document that I'd like to scan, and I need reasonably high-quality output.

The civilian scanners I've used tend to reduce quality to an unacceptable degree for my present purposes - either they skew things, or introduce too many artifacts, or just plain make things look crummy. (I know that some of these things can sometimes be corrected after the fact, though why not avoid the problems in the first place?) I'm also reluctant to entrust this job to your ordinary corner Kinko's (though perhaps I am wrong to do so).

So I'd love a recommendation for some sort of print shop which will do a top-notch scan job, and then either email me the file or stick it on a USB drive (I need a PDF). The output doesn't need to be perfect (this isn't a commercial venture or anything), just good - so I'm not looking to spend a fortune. And if you've had success with a Kinko's-type place, those suggestions are welcome, too. The east side of Manhattan is preferred. Thanks.

posted by DavidNYC to shopping (10 comments total)

This seems odd to me. I have a five year old scanner and if I turn it to its highest resolution it creates an image that is finer than even my newish photo printer can print. Have you played around with the scanner settings, like the resolution? What dpi are you scanning at and how large (i.e. in pixels) are these artifacts you're seeing?

I sometimes use my scanner on maximum resolution in lieu of a magnifying glass.
posted by XMLicious at 8:46 PM on May 8

Most "professional" document scanners are made for volume, speed, and reliability, not quality. Sometimes the big ones have better sheet-feeders that result in less page skew than home/SOHO models, but most of the time they skew just as much or more than the Kodak I have at home, and it just gets corrected in software. It's the software, and more importantly the settings that the software is configured with, that make most of the difference.

The very best quality you're going to get, assuming text and line art, is by doing each page singly, on a flatbed, scanning to B&W (1-bit) at a fairly high resolution (300+ dpi; 600 if you have finely drawn or halftoned illustrations or very small footnotes in serif fonts), and then de-skewing* and assembling into a PDF or whatever your output format is with OmniPage or something similar. (OmniPage's deskew algorithm works very well IMO; it's at least as good as that in most "professional" systems costing kilobucks.) There's really no reason you can't get this done at Kinkos, or pretty much any other print shop in the world; the key is just going to be explaining what you want done and letting them know you're willing to pay for their time.

The low quality results that you're used to from "civilian scanners" are probably due to misconfiguration on the part of the users running them, plus badly-chosen defaults. Many scanners default to a high bit depth (so very nice color) at a relatively low resolution. This is terrible for scanning text, and leads to bloated, hard-to-read output. But you'd be surprised how good the output from the same scanner can look when you turn down the bit depth to monochrome and turn up the resolution to capture all the detail on the page.

Anyway, I don't think you'll have to go to any sort of specialist firm to get what you're looking for; just about any copy shop ought to be capable of it — it's more important that they have employees who will listen and do as you request than any special equipment.

* If you scan on a flatbed there really shouldn't be any de-skewing necessary, but I normally hit the button in Omnipage anyway; sometimes the scanner's edge isn't parallel to the actual movement path and you'll get a little skew even if you're careful.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:57 PM on May 8

XMLicious, what can I say? Every scanner I used at my workplace seems to produce only so-so results. I do appreciate all the advice here.
posted by DavidNYC at 9:10 PM on May 8

But DavidNYC - the thing is, what resolution do you have it set to? My scanner defaults to 300dpi but is actually capable of 1200dpi. But the scan takes a good five minutes for a full page at 1200dpi, that's why the default is lower. So I'm wondering if the problem is the settings rather than a need for different hardware.

Also, you can easily manually de-skew an image with an image editor like GIMP that provides a "free rotate" tool. The trick is, to avoid getting artifacts from the rotation, you need to scale up the image first - by, say, 400% - then do the rotate, then scale it back down to the original size.
posted by XMLicious at 9:47 PM on May 8

Sorry, I should have answered that part. One type of scanner was clearly designed for people who are allergic to technology - it's somehow set up by IT to forbid any tweaking of settings. The other does allow you to change resolutions (up to 600 dpi, as I recall), but that hasn't yielded satisfactory results. This sort is a scanner built into a copy machine, so I wonder if quality suffers for trying to be a "jack of all trades"? Though of course, may people happily use multi-function machines. (Also, I've never spotted any settings for bit depth, as Kadin mentions.)

I think the artifacts make be caused by a buildup of dirt on parts I can't readily clean myself. And I could probably help with the skew by doing one page at a time on the flatbed rather than using the sheet feeder. Also, why do you need to scale the image up to avoid artifacts when rotating in GIMP? I really appreciate the help.
posted by DavidNYC at 9:56 PM on May 8

Ah, well, bum luck with the scanners at work then. I can often get rid of that on my home scanner just by using Windex, but if it gets lots of use or is poorly designed I suppose it's possible that dust has gotten inside something which you couldn't fix.

I've been wracking my brain but I can't think of a good way to articulate why you need to do the scaling in GIMP. It's sort of like, the pixels don't quite "line up" properly and you get these funny lines and choppiness in the image (more apparent if you're working with something like a photograph) if you don't do the scaling as part of the process. Though for all I know other tools might do the scaling automatically, GIMP is the only tool I've used for that.

One other thing - if the image you're scanning is all solid colors and lines, with no shading or gradients, after you get it scanned you might be interested to try feeding it through a program like potrace (free but black-and-white only) or VectorMagic (does colors and really easy to use but you have to pay for it) before converting it to PDF. This will convert the "raster image" that is output by the scanner into a "vector image", effectively infinite resolution, and if you have the right sort of image and you're lucky it might come out looking better than the original.
posted by XMLicious at 10:11 PM on May 8

I think you're overcomplicating what you need. Start with a scanner - seriously, almost any scanner available today should be able to scan beyond 600dpi - and clean up the images as you need to. Start with a CLEAN scanner - Windex, microfiber fabric - then play with the scanning settings to find the best one. This whole procedure shouldn't take more than a couple hours. That's far less time than you'll spend at a copy shop.
posted by chrisinseoul at 10:35 PM on May 8

You can get a cheapo scanner for your PC for like $100 that will produce fantastic images. It sounds like the ones at work are just not configured to scan things slowly (which is what will happen at higher quality settings) and are dirty.

Also when you say quality, are you talking about detail or stuff like color and saturation? You may need to adjust the settings for gamma and stuff to get it right, but it should be fine.
posted by delmoi at 11:28 PM on May 8

Delmoi: I'm only talking about the crispness of ordinary black-and-white text. Thanks again to all.
posted by DavidNYC at 12:42 AM on May 9

You could try snapter which is software that supposedly produces scanner quality images from a digital camera. I've never used it, but there's 14 day free trial (which hopefully doesn't add a "snapter" watermark on the images).
posted by ShooBoo at 12:43 AM on May 9