MacDirectory Magazine

COMPANY PROFILE VUESCAN >AN UPDATE ON THE WORLD OF SCANNING Hamrick Software has been involved with scanning since 1998, and today has over 200,000 customers with its flagship product VueScan. VueScan has been downloaded more than 7 million times and is the world’s most widely used program for document scanning and film scanning. It works with 1500 models of scanners, on all versions of Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The number of customers has been growing rapidly during the past 5 years, mainly due to changes in scanner technology, the transition from stand-alone scanning to multi- function printer/scanner/copiers, and the lack of support for older scanners in Windows 7 and Mac OS X. Ed Hamrick, President of Hamrick Software, says, “The scanner market has completely changed in the past 5 years, and the technological reasons for this change are interesting. Flatbed scanners and film scanners achieved their maximum useful resolution several years ago – 600 dpi for document scanning and 4000 dpi for film scanning. Since then, the main innovations have been eliminating lamp warm up delays by using LED lights, and increasing scan speed through more sensitive CCD’s and brighter lights. In this same time period, people have stopped taking pictures with film cameras, so film scanners are now used mainly for scanning people’s old slides and negatives. People are also increasingly scanning their paper documents, usually in PDF form. The market for document scanning is growing rapidly at the same time the market for scanning film is shrinking slowly. Another trend in the past 5 years is that most scanners on the market are now combined with printers – in the lid on top of multi-function printer/scanner/copiers. These often have either a document feeder (for multi-page scanning) or a film scanner attachment – and most vendors produce printers with different combination of scanner attachments. Globalization has also affected the scanner market, with more than 50% of global scanner sales outside the USA. For this reason, VueScan also supports more than 30 languages, both in the user interface and with OCR.” Because of these changes in the scanner market, many companies that used to make scanners have completely stopped making scanners and have stopped producing scanner drivers for new versions of Windows and Mac OS X. These include UMAX, Microtek, and even Nikon. Other vendors have stopped supporting older scanners on newer operating systems, including Epson, HP and Canon. However, these older scanners often work very well, and most people don’t want to throw them away and buy a new scanner. VueScan helps people use their older scanners on Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard. It also adds productivity features that the older scanner drivers didn’t have, including searchable PDF files (Optical Character Recognition, OCR, and PDF) and scanner color calibration for improved color quality. Many features in VueScan also help people scan and organize thousands of slides and negatives. “We recognize that many people own more than one scanner and that most people have more than one computer that they use. You can use a single-user license of VueScan on up to four different computers, with any combination of operating systems, with any number of scanners.” VueScan is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. VueScan offers a full range of advanced features; including options for scanning faded slides and prints and automatically adjusting images to optimum color balance that reduces the need to manually do it in Photoshop. It includes built-in IT8 color calibration of scanners, producing colors that look true to life, batch scanning and other advanced and powerful scanning and productivity features, including searchable PDF output. For a detailed listing of VueScan features, see: http://www.hamrick.com/abo.html VueScan is available in two editions, Standard Edition ($39.95 USD) and Professional Edition ($79.95). The Professional Edition adds unlimited free upgrades, advanced IT8 color calibration and support for raw scan files. Multi-user licenses are available. A fully functional, trial copy of VueScan can be downloaded from http://www.hamrick.com/. 104 MacDirectory

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