Phil Bubin using the Slow Scan mode
Scanning archived documents is a major business for many reprographics firms. The documents in those archives come in a giant range, from perfectly clean to fragile and dirty. Speed is usually a great advantage when someone is faced with a pile of prints to scan, but sometimes speed is the enemy, such as when fragile prints need to be scanned. KIP has developed a solution for that situation – the slow scan mode on the KIP 2300 scanner allows a user to scan a fragile document with the care it needs.
In this interview with Phil Bubin, KIP Product Manager, he explains the concept.
What exactly is slow scanning?
Phil Bubin: Slow scanning is simply a way to safely handle fragile documents. It uses the slowest speed of the scanner. As soon as the operator turns on slow scanning, it slows it down to the slowest possible scan. When you feed the document in, the scanner auto-detects the width, and the operator can see the page right on the screen as it feeds in. In a lot of cases the operator uses a clear carrier page to protect the document as it goes through the scanner.
How can the operator clean up the scans?
An important feature of the system is that the operator can zoom in on the dirtiest area of the scan and draw a box there to tell the software that that area is supposed to be white. The software will then automatically do a background cleanup on the entire document.
Similarly, the operator can make sure all the lines are super clear by drawing a box on a portion of the line and indicating that it’s supposed to be black. All the lines in the drawing snap to a nice black. So, you go from your original, which is kind of grayish and dirty, to a nice clean original with dark lines. You can do this for color as well. When a system is that simple, it makes people a lot more confident.
Another feature about this software is KIP provides users with templates that contain the settings for common drawing clean-up situations. You can also create your own templates to match the job you’re working on. So, if I have a group of images that need light cleanup, heavy cleanup, whatever, it's real easy to create those presets. You click on that, and it cleans up the entire drawing for you. Then of course you can tweak it after the fact as well.
So this is designed to make large jobs easier, right?
Exactly. What a lot of people do is they'll get a set of documents, and they'll do a white point and a black point on the first page. If it's a construction set, they're all generally the same level of dirtiness and ugliness, especially that black point if it's printed on an inkjet or maybe even an older legacy toner base system, if you remember the black lines weren't solid black like they are with a KIP, so they're kind of washed out a little bit. This gives you a chance to enhance it, especially if you're going to bring it into a CAD application.
We took that slow scanning feature, and we turned it into its own video just to show customers about what you can do with the 2300 when it comes to dropping the speed of the scanner and then also doing some document cleanup and using carrier pages. We're still teaching a lot of people.
The market for scanning doesn’t seem to be drying up, does it? It seems that a lot of documents that were originally digital and then printed are now being scanned and made digital again, because people lost the files or never had them in the first place.
Right, we thought we went through that phase where everyone digitized all their documents, but not everybody did it. Now we're getting that second tier of customers who say, “We have to scan all these, or I have to scan these for my customer.” Our 720 scanner is very lightweight, I could put it under my arm and carry it to a customer’s site and do the scanning there.
Does the 720 also have the slow scan feature?
Yes. It doesn't have the board function where it lifts the inside of the optics like the 2300 does, but it's still capable of scanning at one-and-a-half millimeters thick so that you can still get a carrier page through it.
Are you finding that you are selling this system to end users or reprographics firms who are doing it for their clients?
I think it's a little of both. We are finding that we're selling a number of these scanners into city governments, larger companies that still have that archive and then even several repro shops. The 2300 especially is more a reprographics firm scanner, with the level of scanning and speed of it.
Learn more about Slow Scanning at https://www.kip.com/insights.php?i=4 and reach out to KIP at seminars@kip.com to schedule a live KIP virtual product demonstration on a KIP scanner or printer.