By Ed Avis
It’s not often that a reseller creates a new piece of equipment from the ground up, but that’s what happened when Sean Eikenbery, president of ScanWide, realized that there was a gap in the high-quality flatbed scanner market. He created the ScanWide XL to fill that gap.
His new creation, which is ready to ship now, features a high-density camera mounted above a 52” x 36” steel table. Because the camera is mounted above the object being scanned, one click captures the entire image. The camera set-up allows for a depth of field, so the ScanWide XL can successfully capture in-focus images of 3D objects, framed artwork, oversized books, textiles, etc.
“The depth of field gives you what I call the ‘money zone,’ which is the area on the scanned image that is in good enough focus to be sold,” explains Eikenbery, whose company resells Image Access and Contex scanners into the AEC, government and cultural markets. “With this scanner, you could scan something as big as a hat, all of it in focus.”
And the scanner is a speedy solution for scanning damaged or fragile documents that can’t be fed through a rollfeed – the operator just lays the document face-up on the table and hits “scan.”
“It’s a ‘jack of all trades’ scanner,” Eikenbery says. “If I only had one scanner, this would be the one to scan everything. The images are high-quality, sellable images.”
Many of the features in this scanner are available in other flatbed scanners now on the market, but the gap that the ScanWide XL fills is pricepoint: The competion sells for six digits, while the ScanWide XL is priced in the $40,000 range. Another advantage of this scanner is that the software, provided by Eikenbery’s company PeopleDocs, provides a live preview of the scan. Many others offer only a simulated preview, which may not be as accurate.
“The big breakthrough with this scanner is the cameras,” Eikenbery says. “They actually have been around for a while, but until recently the lenses weren’t good enough for this kind of application. We have the exclusive rights from the manufacturer to sell this camera in a document scanner.”
Eikenbery, who has an engineering background, drafted the basic design for the ScanWide XL himself. He brought that design to a fabricating company that refined the concept and now manufactures it for him.
The camera mounts into a standard tripod camera mount that is flanked by two flat LED lights for illumination. The table is also custom-made – it’s stable but not super heavy, so it securely holds the item or document being scanned but can be easily moved. Because it’s steel, the operator can use magnets to keep documents flat if necessary. The whole thing can be easily disassembled in about 30 minutes, Eikenbery says. The pieces fit into a 9-inch-wide box so it can be conveniently transported to a jobsite.
"After attending archivist and museum association conferences, it was apparent many of these customers did not have the $100,000 plus budget that typical overhead systems cost,” notes Ed Delaney, ScanWide’s director of business development. “Instead, they need an affordable system or a local reprographics firm to digitize their historic documents, maps and artwork. The Scanwide XL is the perfect solution."
ScanWide joined APDSP as a Gold Vendor Member in November, and Eikenbery says he is willing to wholesale the scanner to reprographics firms that are resellers. Because the scanner is manufactured in the United States, it is compliant with the Trade Agreements Act (TAA) and can be sold to the Department of Defense and other government agencies.
Interested in learning more? Contact Eikenbery at sean@scanwide.com and/or click on the video below, which was Eikenbery's presentation during the 2021 APDSP Zoom Trade Show.