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Honey, I Shrunk the
Paperport: By Ross L. Kodner, Esq. When I first came up with my Paper LESS Office concept™ about five years ago, the approach to turning physical paper into digital paper was facilitated by Visioneer’s ground-breaking Paperport scanners. Those magical little egg-carton-shaped and sized individual scanners revolutionized low-cost document imaging; the decentralized approach of scattering them literally all over the office made tremendous sense. As the Paperport scanners evolved they continually improved, decreasing in size and weight and increasing in connectivity options, color capability and resolution, all culminating in the current Strobe Pro models (www.visioneer.com). In fact, the Paperports virtually carved out the genre of small, tube-shaped individual-focused sheetfed scanners . . . often these little units are generically referred to as "Paperports." I’ve even overhead the process of scanning using this class of device as "Paperporting" (from the French verb, paperporter, no doubt, as in "Je paperporte" which idiomatically translates to "I scan sheets of paper ranging in size from business cards to photos to legal-sized paper using this nifty 1 lb. portable scanning device"). But when I first was shown a pre-release version of the current Visioneer Strobe scanner model back at ABA TECHSHOW ‘97, I remember commenting to the company’s product development manager: "Wow! This thing’s cool but there’s still just one problem . . . " He asked a bit indignantly, seemingly stymied that their latest whizbang creation could have any problems at all, "What’s the matter with it?" I said, "I love the portability of the sub-two pound form factor, and I love the smaller size compared to your original Paperport scanners . . . . but what’s the point if I have to lug around a massive square 2 lb. power brick to make the thing work?" Silence . . . and then the response "I guess power supply technology hasn’t really caught up yet." And that’s where a new product from long-time peripheral and PC case-maker, Antec (www.antec-inc.com) comes in . . . the Attaché mobile scanner. As to the shape, think of it as a Visioneer Strobe that has been downsized by about 25% in size and weight. It’s thinner and lighter than a Strobe, barely registering on any scale but a postage meter where it "tilts" the digital "needle" at a paltry 12 ounces. Think: "Paperport Strobe Meets The Atkins Diet!" Until you hold an Attaché in your hands, it’s really hard to imagine how light and compact it is. Taking out a ruler (remember those analog measuring sticks?), it shows a width of just 11.25", a height of 1.825" and a depth of 2" - that’s really tiny. The paper insertion slot is just a shade over 8.5" wide so it actually makes it quite easy to line up the paper to be scanned, unlike the Paperport Strobe Pro with its 9" slot . . . and no room for paper skewing during feeding time. From a Road Warrior’s perspective, this little digitizing weapon barely makes a dent in even the most jam-packed of laptop cases. But it gets better . . . don’t bother digging through the packing box looking for the power brick to plug it in . . . you won’t find one! Finally! Nothing else to pack (in other words, nothing else to FORGET to pack)! Just pack the little scanner in the included leather-like tube-shaped carrying case (yes, a full herd of naugas are sacrificed to make these protective sheaths) and away you go on your image-enabled trip. The unit plugs into a laptop via its PC Card slot. This really does make the unit far more mobile, than office-oriented in character since, after all, how many of us have installed PC Card readers in our desktop PCs? (Um . . . don’t answer that . . . the number is "zero"). The PC Card attaches to an extremely slim braided permanently attached plastic cable which extends, flexibly, 20". This means that there’s plenty of cable to situate the Attaché anywhere around one’s laptop where access is most comfortable. The PC Card is detachable as well for ease in packing. The reason there is no power brick because power is drawn from the laptop’s PC Card slot . . . way cool. Although this means there is no other connectivity available . . . no serial, USB, parallel or Firewire connections, it’s a reasonable trade-off to keep the price down, the size down and provide the power offered by the PC Card slot’s interface. The installation experience is flawless and simple. The TWAIN-compatible unit comes with a single CD-ROM containing the needed driver and the Presto PageManager 4.0 scanning and image management software (www.newsoftinc.com). Presto’s PageManager software is bundled with many lower-cost scanning products and it’s a worthy alternative to my favorite Paperport software (www.scansoft.com). In fact, if you didn’t see the program’s name in the application’s title bar, it could easily be mistaken for Paperport software--personally, if I were them, I’d be worried about drawing a 21st century version of a "look and feel" copyright infringement suit. Uncannily, the screen layout is almost 100% identical to the Paperport software with a visual folder tree on the left side of the "electronic desktop", clickable thumbnails of the digitized paper in the main part of the screen and a row of applications at the bottom of the screen. Scan quality is excellent. I tested everything from handwritten notes to a clean sheet of laser printed paper (Times Roman 12 pt. text predominantly), a color photograph of my daughter (Kodner2.html) and another of my other daughter (a 1978 Triumph Spitfire named "Tricia"). The software comes with five pre-configured scanning settings:
You also can use a "Custom Settings" screen where the resolution is adjustable (from 50 to 1200 dpi, the latter being "interpolated" by the software since the maximum actual scanable resolution is 300x600 (horizontal by vertical)). You can also adjust the color content (black and white, grayscale and color), the paper size with a number of common sizes pre-defined for auto-cropping (something handy that Paperport software doesn’t do) and also several image adjustments including brightness, contrast, gamma correction, highlight and shadow--all with convenient slider bars and a preview function to pre-test scanning results. Overall, there is an impressive range of image processing adjustments for a free bundled scanning product--a hearty "thumbs up" is in order! Subjectively, scanned image quality is very good. Photos scanned at 300 dpi and with the "color" setting yielded sharp, vivid onscreen colors and top-notch color printouts, especially when output via a photo-capable inkjet printer onto glossy paper (test print on copy paper first so you don’t waste $1.00+ per sheet photo paper!). More importantly, all manners of text-based documents scanned very clearly at 75 and 100 dpi for archival and retrieval purposes and with decent OCR results as well (more on the included OCR software later). As with the Paperport software, one can drag the thumbnail of a scanned image onto one of the bottom-row icons and do all sorts of things including FAXing it, OCRing it, filling in a form, printing it, editing the image and more. The program automatically found my copies of WinFAX, Word 2000 and WordPerfect 7, 8 and 9 (for OCRing text-containing documents), recognized my default Windows printer, found Corel Presentations and Quattro Pro (but curiously, not Microsoft Powerpoint or Excel). I was able to easily add links for additional applications, much in the same manner as one can do with the Paperport software. Included support applications include Presto OCR for text recognition, Presto ImageFolio for image retouching and editing and Presto PageType for automated fill-in of pre-printed forms. Interestingly, I also tested the scanner with Scansoft’s latest Paperport Deluxe 6.1 image management software. With full TWAIN support, I was able to instantly scan into the Paperport software and drop thumbnails right onto the Paperport "desktop" without any device-specific configuration required. This application flexibility is what is truly wonderful about TWAIN-compliance when scanning. The bundled OCR software works reasonably well, although it is clearly a "lite" product--curiously, while the PageManager bottom-row icon says "Presto OCR 3," it appears the OCR engine used is FineReader 4 from Abbyy Systems (www.abbyy.com/index.htm). This is a European-produced application widely used across the E.U. I tested OCR, actually TORTURE-tested OCR by scanning a two column document with lots of bullets, reverse text for headings and varying point sizes, all on a gray-fibered paper. To my surprise, out of 2000 counted characters, there were only 5 errors (mis-recognized characters). Formatting was not retained since the document was scanned in ASCII (RTF was the other alternative). That’s a 99.75% accuracy rate, aside from the formatting issues. The document was scanned at 150 dpi. It was also possible to use the more capable Scansoft Textbridge Pro 9 OCR software that was on my system, simply by "registering a new application" using a button provided on PageManager’s toolbar. Scanning speed is not particularly swift. Speed test results (from the initial feed to the time a clickable thumbnail appeared on screen) were as follows using a WordPerfect document consisting of a full page of dual column text in a 12 pt. Arial typestyle with a large reverse text page heading (52K stored as a native WordPerfect 9 text file):
A 4" x 6" color photo showed the following scanning speeds and file sizes:
So while not terribly speedy, the program is fairly conservative on the resulting file sizes. Best visual results for the text document were at 100 and 150 dpi and at 400 dpi for the color photo. As with the Paperport software, which pioneered the concept of searchable image text (via a process Visioneer originally called "background context indexing" which enables a "SimpleSearch"), there is automated text recognition that happens during idle time, in the background. This permits full-text and "fuzzy" searches. I found that every item I searched for was located in all the documents where I expected to find the target results as well as some others I was unaware of. Unfortunately, this seems to be a strictly "local" hard drive function, not something that is networkable in any way, as is also the case with PageManager’s overall electronic desktop. So with the combination of ultra-light weight, super-compact size, lack of a power brick, and impressive bundle of included software, the Antec Attaché is a mobile lawyer’s scanning delight--one should find its way into every Road Warrior’s carrying case. PROS: * Lightweight and compact size CONS: * PC Card connection only CONTACT: Antec, Incorporated SRP: $129.95, Street Pricing around $125.00
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