Developer Forum

I have a Visoneer OneTouch 8900 USB scanner and am very tired of the
poor scan results. Scans are blurry, OCR is mostly pointless at
anything below 300 dpi (slow scans at 300 dpi).

Are there any better scanners priced less than $200 USA? Especially
with a much better OCR package (not TextBridge Pro 9.0).

I use the scanner for:
1. Scanning old printed journals (see below)
2. Scanning old photographs for CDR archival / retouching /
reprinting

The issues I have:
1. Slow scanning times (45 seconds a scan or longer)
(2.4ghz P4, usb1, 128mb or more free memory, gigabytes
of free disk space)

2. Poor raw OCR (accuracy for 300dpi is 91% and the real accuracy is
that about 25% of the words are mis-OCRed - a big issue). I've tried
a 600dpi scan but that takes about 4-5 minutes per scan.

Here are the details for the printed journals:
1. Each page is 10 inches by 12 inches (I cannot cut them
and sheet-feed them)
2. Each page is slightly yellowed (about tan coloured)
3. The text is 8 or 9 point with serifs
4. The newspaper is usually in a 4 column format
5. There is some mixing of text point sizes ( 7 point is the smallest,
with 8 point the usual font)
6. There are a significant number of single character fractions such
as '1/4', '1/2', '2/3', '7/8' (i.e., each digit of the fraction is 4
or 5 point)

My workflow:

1. Scan test page at 300 dpi (requires 2 scans since the page is
larger than the scanning area)
2. Set scanner to scan in black and white (set threshold level to
compensate for the yellow paper)
3. Scan
4. Fix any page skew
5. Crop if needed
6. Save as windows monochrome bitmap file

Repeat 1-6 for an entire journal issue (about 20 pages)

7. Bring the pages into TextBridge Pro 9.0 as poor quality newspaper
scans.
8. Enable OCR training
9. Process each page
10. Send text to Notepad (removes all garbage formatting)
11. Reorder paragraphs if necessary to be in the correct order
12. Copy and paste into MS word
13. Spell check in MS word - correct mispellings due to OCR process -
leave in mispellings in original source material