Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!smsc.sony.com!dce
From: dce@smsc.sony.com (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Scanner as photocopier?
Message-ID: <1990Dec31.173038.9729@smsc.sony.com>
Date: 31 Dec 90 17:30:38 GMT
References: <18490@shlump.nac.dec.com> <959@chem.ucsd.EDU>
Organization: Sony Microsystems Corp, San Jose, CA
Lines: 17

In article <959@chem.ucsd.EDU> rich@sdchemf (Richard Kanner) writes:
>Get yourself a big hard disk to boot.  One 8 x 11.5 page will be about
>500K in assuming a 1 bit/pixel scan and a page is about 640 x 800 pixels.

True, but what about compression?

Simple compression (Lempel-Ziv or Huffman) probably wouldn't do much
in this case, but what about FAX-style compression?

Also, how good is OCR these days?  My experiences with this area are 10
years old, but they involved very careful circumstances (OCR font belt
printers, expensive scanners), and the results were pretty
disappointing (scanner operators usually lasted about 4 months before
they either quit or moved up).  How easy is it now to recognize, for
example, newspaper or magazine article characters scanned at reasonable
resolution (high enough to get the dots, not so high that ink artifacts
get in the way)?