Wide-format Scanner Buyer's Guide
The Indisputable “No-Spin” Buyer's Guide for Wide-Format Scanners.
by Henrik Vestermark
Some background information and a few general considerations to help lay the groundwork as you consider this major hardware investment.
This article is kindly reproduced courtesy of the author, Henrik Vestermark, an independent consultant with professional experience in the wide-format scanner industry since 1988. Previously Contex's Vice President for the Americas his expertise includes all aspects of the wide-format and large-format digital capture market, with experience in development, sales and marketing for a wide-format scanner manufacturer. In 2006, Vestermark started The Other Solutions, a web-based company focusing on delivery of affordable solutions and consultancy to the IT and wide-format markets, specializing in the identification of business needs and justification of solutions. He currently lives in Idaho.
hve@theothersolutions.com
http://www.theothersolutions.com
Buyer's Guide for Wide-Format Scanners.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
With only a few players in the world-wide market, the task of selecting your next wide format scanner, based on your needs, is manageable. Be critical when looking at the manufacturer’s specifications. Manufacturers specify features that are not necessarily benefits that translate into an improved bottom line for you. We can provide an outline for your use to determine you needs.
First - determine you physical scanning needs and be careful not to go wider than what you need. The best bargain priced scanner supports a maximum scan width between 36” and 42”. If you choose a wider scanner, you may pay a relatively high premium for the extra scan width.
Second - choose the scanning resolution that will meet your quality demands. Ignore the specification for maximum (interpolated) scanning resolution which is done by simple scaling. Use the optical scanning resolution as a measure of quality and select a scanner with a higher optical resolution, assuming all other measures are equal. Comparison between brands should be exercised with caution since quality varies even between scanners with a nearly identical specification.
Third - be careful when evaluating color scanning performance. The connecting PC is the bottleneck and therefore it is often questionable to select a scanner that provides a color scanning speed above 1-1½”/sec at 200 dpi. In other words, it is more beneficial to ensure you are using a high performance PC than a high performance scanner.
Fourth - always estimate how many documents you will need to scan over a selected period of time. (Without that number, a return on investment analysis cannot be performed.)
Fifth - always justify your needs with a Return on Investment analysis. A tool for performing such an analysis can be found at:
http://www.theothersolutions.com/Wfs/All/ROI_CALC.htm
Scope of the Buyer's Guide
There are only a few manufacturer’s serving the world-wide wide format scanner market. This is both good and bad. The good part is that you only have to investigate a small number of few manufacturers’ in order to select the scanner that meets you needs. The bad part is that your choices are limited.
When you dig into the matter, you will soon discover that scanner manufacturers’ are mostly selling “technology”. This is not necessary bad, however you would need to filter the information’s and evaluate them based on something that can translate into real business benefits for you.
This guide is not intended to be an in-depth or comprehensive guide to the wide format scanner industry. Instead, it is intended to provide you with a clear understanding of how to shape you needs and to narrow down your choices for your wide format scanner.
When we talk about a “wide format scanner”, we are specifically referring to the stand-alone wide format scanners, and not the multi-function devices where a scanner is built into a printer system from manufacturers’ like HP, Canon, Océ, Ricoh, Xerox, KIP, etc. These multi-function scanner/printer systems are another interesting topic that are covered in detail at a later date.
This Buyer's Guide first takes you through who the players in the market are and their respective market share. Then we address the first-time buyers question, “What really matters when consider the purchase of a wide format scanner?”. We continue on to the more practical aspect of determining your specific scanning needs, and how to narrow your choices down to a manageable list of 2-3 different scanners. Finally, we conclude with “where to go from here”.
Who are the players?
There are 4 major manufacturer’s in the world.
www.contex.com
www.colortrac.com
www.graphtecusa.com
www.widecominc.com
Of these, Contex offers the same scanner under three different brands, namely;
www.contex.com
www.vidar.com
www.gtcocalcomp.com
Differences between the Contex-branded products are cosmetic e.g. a different streamer or color touch-pad. The functional specifications and actual performance is identical. Although the products are identical, the differentiation relates to their level of commitment to quality customer service and technical support.
What is their real market share?
Although all four manufacturer’s claim to be the “leading supplier” of wide format scanners, any market share percentage claims should be considered with caution. Don’t read too much into market share. What is important is that you find a scanner that meet your business needs, not necessarily other needs.
What really matters?
Based on a survey from Digital Output in 2003, the top five most influential buying criteria when considering wide format scanner are:
| Buying criterion | Importance |
| Price | 30% |
| Reliability | 12% |
| Quality | 11% |
| Performance | 11% |
| Customer service/Tech support | 10% |
You should pay attention to the fact that neither “brand name” or “features” reached the Top 5 of this list! What does this tells us?
It tells us that you as a buyer are looking for the best bargain (price), high reliability (works day and night), quality (represent the actual drawing accurately), scanning speed (performance), and in case something happens, a support and service provider backing you up to minimize down time.
Why did brand name and features not meet the list?
The answer to this question is simple - none of the manufacturers are able to differentiate their product offering in the market place such that it represents something unique and appealing to the buyer. In addressing the buyer's needs, all of the scanner products will be able to meet most scanner needs of today.
Features are just buzz words that do not really appeal to buyers today.
In the beginning of large format scanner era (1988-1996), most buyers saw the features list as a way to gain competitive advantages. As scanners move from the early adaptors into the early commodity (1996-2004) and the main stream (2004-present), the importance of features dropped significantly, as clearly expressed in Digital Output survey from 2003.
Price
This is the single most important factor that determines your return on investment and the tangible benefit that it can deliver to your business.
Scanner prices have been fairly constant for the last 15 years. When manufacturer’s have released new products, they have maintained the price level equal to the product it replaced, although they have added more features.
This worked well in the early stage of wide format scanners, but as the need for features has diminished or is less significant to the buyer, the buyer's focus has been on getting the right price for the features needed and not paying for features they don’t need. It’s my belief that in today’s market, the officially stated MSRP price is “excessive” and there is growing downward price pressure that will force the market to a correction in the foreseeably near future.
(Editor's Note: Since 2003 when Digital Ouput is quoted in this article the price of entry-level scanners has fallen dramatically while at the same there has been a quantum leap in capability, most notably from Colortrac.)
Reliability
This is the happy story. A scanner has very few moving parts and all of the scanner manufacturer’s can produce highly reliable scanners that last a long time.
Most scanners support download of new firmware and software making it easy for buyers to correct bugs. After a scanner is up a running, its reliability is usually higher compared to other peripherals like printers, and most of the maintenance can easily be performed by the owner without involving a technician to service it.
Nowadays the wide format scanners sold in the US are backed-up with a two year on-site warranty, further eliminating the issue with reliability.
A little warning note is needed, however. When a manufacturer ships new products, expect frequent firmware/software updates for about six months. This is typically the amount of time it takes a manufacturer to resolve most bugs in the system. It also indicates that you should not eliminate a new scanner model just because you have seen a bad demo or seen that the quality is not up to the standard. For a newly introduced scanner this is to be expected. Rest assured that six months down the road, the scanner will worked as expected.
Quality
Everybody wants quality today and most often they get it!
From a manufacturer's point of view, all scanners are quality built and should show similarly low failure rate. There are two scanning issues to consider however; black & white scanning and color scanning. Then there is a general rule of thumb that the higher the optical resolution a scanner has the higher the potential to deliver increased quality scans.
Black & White quality
Today, black & white scanning rarely presents an issue. From a scanner perspective, all scanners handle B&W fairly well. What determines the scanning quality is the “line pair/mm”. The higher that number, the more alternation of black and white pixels can be detected, resulting in a more accurate scan.
This concept is not easy to grasp, so I will use another analogy with contour lines in a map. The contour line in a map represent the elevations. If we have steep descent or climb, the contour lines are positioned very close together. In a scanner with a low “line pair/mm” rating, the contour lines bleed together while on a scanner with a high “line pair/mm” rating, the contours are kept separate and therefore the resulting image more accurately represents the scanned map.
No scanner manufacturer specifies line pair/mm, so optical resolution can be used as a substitute for that measure. The question from a buyer perspective is “what is high enough resolution?”.
The application for Black & White scanning is quite often engineering drawings. Most engineering drawings can be scanned sufficiently with resolutions between 200 dpi and 400 dpi. Since all scanners on the market are capable of doing that, your choice is not very limited.
(Editor's Note: Not all. The Contex Hawk-Eye is limited to 200 dpi optical.)
Below are 3 examples of 6pt text font scanned on scanners with 200 dpi, 400dpi, and 600 dpi optical resolutions.
6pt text scanned at 200 dpi optical resolution."
6pt text scanned at 400 dpi optical resolution."
6pt text scanned at 600 dpi optical resolution."
200 dpi optical resolution is at the critical end of acceptable quality for small text. 400 dpi is considerably better, although it still shows some jagged characters. 600 dpi is clearly the best with smooth and nice edges. A sample of different resolutions leads us to the following recommendation: Always favor scanners with higher optical resolution, keeping all other measures equal.
Black & White drawing quality
Here we are moving into the forgotten art of cleaning up detiorated drawings and blueprints. In the early '90s, this was a big topic because of the introduction of “adaptive thresholding” that suppressed background noise in the drawings and delivered a better quality scanned image than the original.
Before and After Adaptive Thresholding."
Today however, all scanner manufacturers offer some kind of adaptive thresholding to “clean-up” the original. If you are interested in scanning older engineering drawings you should pay attention to the various thresholding features. However, adaptive thresholding is not a 100% accurate technology and from a buyer's perspective, the difference among the manufacturers as a result of using this technology is marginal.
Color Quality
This is where most new buyers are looking toward.
When scanning in color, it is usually understood to be 24 bit color. A special application exists for indexed color (maximum of 256 different colors), but with the increase in storage capacity and compression technique (JPEG and JPEG 2000) the need for 8 bit color is quickly fading away.
24 bit color is what you are getting out of the scanner, however the internal number of bits the various scanners can capture ranges between 36 bit to 48 bit as their internal color capture. The manufacturers make a big sales pitch about the number of color bits they capture per color channel and claim the more bits, the better color quality. Theoretically, they are right. However if the scanner only outputs 24 bit color, how much internal color capture is enough?
First of all, the problem is more visible in the darker end of the color spectrum. The reason is a human eye does not see color linearly, like the color capturing technology does, so color data is passed through a gamma filter. Unfortunately the side effect of that is that it creates “holes” in the darker end of the color spectrum which means that darker color is not represented as correctly and visible color posterization can be seen.
To answer the question of "how many bits is enough?" look at the results of capturing with 24 bit, 30 bit, 36 bit, 42 bit and 48 bit color capture. You can see the differences at the 24, 30 and 36 bit but not the difference between 36 and 42 or 48 bit! So, 36 internal color capture should be enough for most buyers. The difference between 24-bit and 30-bit is obvious. It's less obvious from 30 bit to 36 bit. Above 36 bit, it’s really hard to tell!
Performance
This is my favorite topic to discuss. Over the last few years we have seen scanner manufactures claim higher scanning speed which top-out at around 8-12”/sec at 200 dpi Black & White and around 3”/sec at 200 dpi 24 bit color. That’s sound great, but wait, let’s not get too excited.
A couple of years ago I talked with a friend who owns and operates a scanner service shop. He told me that the actual scanning time only represents about 20% of the total service time required to handle and scan a drawing into a file or document management system. With that in mind, a doubling of the scanning speed only yields a 20% improvement in throughput. But that is not all.
All speed specifications you read are based on the theoretical output from the scanner. What happens in real life is a different story. My buying advice is "don’t put to much into the marketing speed specs from the manufacturer".
Different buyers will have a different need or different urgency level for scanning e.g. a service bureau wants to turn around copy jobs as fast as possible and therefore performance is more important to them than it shoulf be to a project based, in-house job of scanning 10,000 originals over the next year.
Black & White performance
The nice part about Black & White scanning is the small amount of data that needs to be sent from the scanner to the PC; typically in the range of 1MB to 10MB of black and white data depending of the complexity of the drawing.
Now let’s look at a typical high performance Black & White scanner that has a speed rating of 10”/sec.
An E-size original of 36”x48” should take only 4.8”sec to scan. However, in real life, you will observe that the scanner does not react at once and a typical delay of 1-4 sec is observable from the time you hit the scan button until the scanner is actually scanning. Our 4.8 sec scan time then increases to 6-9 sec for an E-size drawing. This is equivalent to an average speed of 5.3”-8.3”/sec or an under-performance of 17-47%.
For a D-size (24”x36”) drawing, the difference is greater and the observed average scan speed is 4.7”-7.8” or an under-performance of 22%-53%.
In reality however, we are only talking about seconds and for most applications this is not really the issue.
Color scanning performance
For color scanning performance there is really a discrepancy between marketing specifications and observed performance.
Take for example an E-size 400 dpi 24 bit color scan. The amount of data that needs to be sent to the PC is around 830MB. A typical high performance color scanner states the speed to be 1.5”/sec or 32 sec for a 400 dpi color scan. This translates into a data transfer rate of approx 26MB/sec.
Can the scanner deliver this amount of information per second? Yes.
But what about the Firewire or USB cable throughput? The answer is Maybe.
The top end of what you can expect to get out of a Firewire or USB cable is 25MB/sec sustained transmission. Can the PC handle this amount of data? This answer is a loud NO!
For a standard PC, expect a transfer rate of around 5MB/sec.
For a high end PC, expect a transfer rate of around 10MB/sec.
From a practical point of view your PC is the real bottleneck that will prevent you for utilizing your scanners color scan speed. This observation leads to the conclusion that the buyer should not pursue color scanning speeds above 1.5”/sec at 200 dpi. Instead the buyer should more wisely spend their money on a high-end PC.
Determining your needs
First decide on the length of the investment period. Typical accounting practices depreciate a capital investment over 5 years. Furthermore, scanning quality is mostly dependant on the optical resolution of the scanner.
From a technological point of view there is no limitation with today’s technology to build a 800-1200 dpi optical resolution scanner (today’s scanners top-out at 600 dpi) so it is reasonable to expect that with time mainstream optical resolution will increase today’s average from 400 dpi to 600 dpi and even higher over the next 1-5 years. Five years seems to be a reasonable length of investment period.
Physical limitation
Next determine your minimum requirements of scan width and thickness of material to scan.
Scan Width
For engineering companies that want to convert their legacy paper drawings, achieving this is easy. They just have to determine the maximum width of their drawings. The length does not matter since all wide format scanner manufacturers support unlimited scanning length.
(Editor's Note: Yes, but files have a practical limit on their size and usefulness. Files cannot be of unlimited size. Most very large scans will be scanned at low resolutions in order to reduce their file size. This is not helpful when the original drawing on paper is poor and needs to be scanned at a higher resolution.)
For a “print for pay” shop, it is more difficult. If they restrict the scan width they may have to turn customers away if their drawings exceed the scanner width.
On the other hand, scanners that can scan wider images are usually considerably more expensive than mainstream scanners and limited in numbers. There is therefore a trade-off of between scan-width and scanner price. This should be carefully evaluated when deciding to invest in a wider scanner or not. Changing your need from a 36” to a 42” scanner may increase the average price by about $2,700, as indicated in the table below.
| Scanner width | Average MSRP price | Price range (MSRP) | No. scanners |
| 25” | 10,233 | $8,900-11,900 | 06 |
| 36” | 15,115 | $9,900-21,900 | 30 |
| 42” | 17,378 | $9,995-24,625 | 23 |
| 48” | 23,875 | $23,875 | 01 |
| 54” | 29,289 | $27,900-31,625 | 07 |
Based on August 2006 MSRP pricing and available manufacturer models
The price/scan width ratio revealed that the best price/scan width ratio is around 25-42” scan width. Expect when needing a wider scanner that the choices will be limited and to pay a premium price for wider scan width.
The price/scan width ratio reveals that the best price/scan width ratio is around 25-36-42” scan width.
Thick Media
To finalize the discussion on the physical needs, you will need to decide whether your next scanner needs to be able to scan thick media.
Thick media is usually originals mounted on a foam or gator board or other materials. ¼” thickness (6mm) is the most common for mounted originals.
All scanner manufacturers support thick media scanning although not on all of their models. The “thick” scanner models can usually scan thick media in the range from 0.47” to 0.75”.
Determine your resolution needs
This is the second most important decision you will need to make.
All of the scanner manufacturers scanner models can scan between the ranges of 50-9600 dpi. This seems to be more than enough. However the highest optical resolution these scanner can deliver is between 200-600dpi. All other resolutions are obtained through interpolation which only adds more redundant data to your image file but does not produce any real data from the image.
A couple of years ago there was a marketing war between the scanner manufacturers based on who could produce the highest scanning resolutions. Great for marketing, no value for the buyer.
How can I determine my scanner resolutions needs?
Well, over the years some guidelines have been established by industry experts and it looks like the consensus is around the following typical resolutions for different scanning applications:
| Requirement | Optical resolution needed |
| Scan-to-Archive | 200-300 dpi |
| Scan for Raster Editing | 200-400 dpi |
| Scan for R2V (Vectorisation) | 200-500 dpi |
| Scan to print | 200-400 dpi |
| Scan to GIS | 400-600 dpi |
The numbers of scanners supplying such resolutions are:
| Scanner Resolution | No. Scanners |
| 200 dpi or above | 67 |
| 300 dpi or above | 60 |
| 400 dpi or above | 58 |
| 500 dpi or above | 41 |
| 600 dpi or above | 13 |
Based on August 2006 available manufacturer models.
As can been seen, most manufacturers support 400 dpi for most models. If you scan to archive you should consider 200-300 dpi optical resolution, otherwise stay with the mainstream, around 400 dpi and go higher if scanning for GIS.
(Editor's Note: It's interesting to see how far and how quickly the low-end of the large format scanner market has come since August 1996. In November 2006, of the 30 wide format scanners on our then comparison chart all but four models, the Contex Toucan at 424 dpi and the Contex Hawk-Eye at 200 dpi, were 600 dpi optical. This is now very much the standard for Colortrac, Contex and Graphtec.)
Determine what is NOT part of your criteria.
Lets face it - a scanner is not the solution in itself, it is only part of the solution. Today it is how and for what purpose you use the scanner that is important. In other words, what application are you using to solve your business need?
As scanner manufacturers see that the focus is no longer on the scanner but on the application, they seek to add differentiation to the scanner hardware to try and pitch differences between the two main scanning technologies; camera-based CCD and contact image sensor-based CIS. The CCD area is further divided into folded optics and straight-through optics.
Granted there is a special case where you can demonstrate that one technology works better in some area and vice versa but for the mainstream needs - you couldn’t care less. The purpose of this buyers guide is not to go into a religious discussion about the advantages/disadvantages of the various scanning technology, we will reserve that for a future report.
(Editor's Note: Hoorah! Nice to hear someone else say this for a change!)
Why should it matter that they are talking about different scanning technologies? The reason is simple - there are different makes and models of scanners out there with very similar specifications. Therefore, it is natural for sales people to begin to pitch their underlying technology.
Understanding the differences between scanning benefits that add value to your bottom line and the features that do not is the way to deal with sales people.
Should scanner performance be part of my criteria?
Yes and no - it depends, but don’t put too much emphasis on it, particularly if you are dealing with color scanning at 400 dpi or higher. Let’s look at an example from before and reverse calculate our real color scanning speed.
If our PC is a high end computer with the capacity to handle 10MB/sec scanner data transfer, then an E-size (36”x48”) can be processed by the PC in 83 sec. This is equivalent to accepting scanner data at a rate of 0.6”/sec. In other words, we would only see a throughput of 0.6”/sec from a scanner rated at 1.5”/sec.
In this example the benefit of a high end color scanner is zero when viewed from a performance perspective. For black & white scans the benefit is more tangible because neither the PC nor the interface (Firewire or USB) will slow the scanner down. This observation leads to the following conclusion: It is more beneficial to spend money on a high performance PC than on a high performance scanner!
Another factor to be considered is in regards to scanner performance for use in “scan to print” application.
Today’s printer technology is considerably slower than scanning technology and therefore if the majority of your need is for scan to print, then you should have less focus on scanner performance and more on on printer performance.
Determine the number of drawings to scan over a period.
This is a must. If you don’t have a number you should estimate one, otherwise think twice before you invest into scanning technology. What it all boils down to is whether your investment has a positive return over the period of use.
When considering a scanner it is a requirement to perform some kind of Return on Investment (ROI) analysis, either by calculating a NPV (Net Present Value) of your investment or IRR (Internal Rate of Return), or whatever payback criteria your company is using to justify your investment.
This leads to the following recommendation: If you can’t justify your purchase based on a ROI analysis then don’t purchase anything! The only exception is the convenience aspect of having a scanner in-house versus out-sourcing.
Narrow your choices down!
So far, we have mostly focused our discussion around what should be part of your buying criteria and what should not. Now let’s get to the final part of how to select a new scanner that meets your needs. The considerations mentioned above have been incorporated into an online tool at:
http://theothersolutions.com/Wfs/ROI_CALC.htm
This tool will take you from your needs specification all the way through to your final ROI analysis and conclusion.
The tool is easy to use. Once you have entered actual equipment, scanning and copying parameters, production parameters, the actual cost of a scan2file or scan2copy print, and optional requirement plan, the tool will automatically calculate your return on investment.
This is a two step procedure:
1]. Narrow it down
This is the first step. Anyone familiar with the wide format industry can skip this step. With 67 different scanners from the leading manufacturers, the choice can seem overwhelming. Try to narrow your selection down to 3-5 scanners that you would need to investigate further.
2]. ROI justification
This is the real deal because it shows the business justification for the investment. Will it be a break even value or a return on investment.
Where to go from here?
If done correctly, you will know if you should invest in a wide format scanner - or not. If you decide to move forward, the next step is to go with the selected scanner and then try to get the scanner for the right price. That, however, is a completely different topic that we can discuss at some other time.
This paper was written by Henrik Vestermark of The Other Solutions.
hve@theothersolutions.com
http://www.theothersolutions.com
For comments, discussion or consultancy don’t hesitate to contact:
Henrik Vestermark,
The Other Solutions,
866 E Tuweep St,
Meridian, ID 83642
USA
Phone: +1 208 887 4780
Cell: +1 571 276 4050
Email: hve@theothersolutions.com
Web: www.theothersolutions.com
Skype: henrikvestermark
© Henrik Vestermark 2006.
Henrik Vestermark working the GTCO Calcomp booth at the ESRI Exhibition, 7-10th August 2006, San Diego, CA, USA.
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