Image Access WideTEK CIS scanner Contex large format scanners

REVIEW:

Contex SD4490 large format scanner

... Continued. [Contex SD4490 - previous] [Contex SD4490 - next]

Nextimage Software

The scanning software we were supplied with for the purposes of this review was the Thirty Day Trial version of Contex's new Nextimage Scan+Copy software.

Nextimage is divided into three "tasks": Scan for scanning, Copy for copying and File, which allows you to load, adjust, save and print existing raster images.

Versions

Nextimage comes in three versions:

  • Full Scan+Copy version, which includes the Scan, Copy and File tasks and is a paid for extra.
  • Thirty Day Trial version of the full Scan+Copy version. This is supplied with every Contex SD series scanner.
  • Scan only version, which excludes the Copy task and the colour management aspects of the program. Depending on where you purchase your scanner, the Scan only version may or may not be included in the price of the scanner.

If you are only interested in scanning technical drawings, we would suggest that the Scan only version will do all you need unless you have a volume copy requirement. Although the Scan only version does not include a copy facility, it does include a print facility that allows you to load a scanned image from file and make multiple prints of it. Also, if you are scanning technical documents you are unlikely to require colour management, which is the other benefit of the full Scan+Copy version.

Note that the Contex SD's TWAIN interface comprises the Nextimage Scan task and is supplied free with the scanner. This means that you can scan into any TWAIN compliant program such as Photoshop and take advantage of most of the features described in this review without buying any additional software.

This is really nice software

Overall, we were extremely impressed with Nextimage. It's clear that a lot of thought has gone into the interface, making this one of the most easy to use, uncluttered pieces of software we have seen. (Of course, ease of use is always a subjective judgement!)

All settings and options are logically arranged in expanding menus down the right hand side of the screen. If you work through the options from top to bottom you will not miss any settings that you may need to set. Options that you don't need to change much can be hidden, while options you need to change all the time can be left visible.

For example, below are the settings and options for the Scan task. If you click the Scan option, it expands to show the scan options Input Size, Resolution and Advanced along with their current settings. These options can be expanded in turn.

    

    

Selecting scan settings is easy

In our opinion, one of the most important aspects of scanning software is its ability to set scan settings easily. If you cannot do this, you are destined either to end up with poor quality scans or to spend a lot of time scanning and rescanning, experimenting with different settings until you find the right ones.

In Nextimage, selecting scan settings is very easy. First, click the Preview Icon. The scanner scans your document and a preview of it appears on the screen.

Now, move the slider bars, watching the image change in real time, until the settings are correct:

Each setting includes a reset option, so it's easy to get back to default settings if you need to.

A useful feature for helping to select scan settings is the Details feature. This lets you jump from one "difficult" area of a document to another, to ensure that the scan settings you have chosen are good for all difficult areas.

To use the Details feature, define each difficult area as a Detail. Details you have defined appear as thumbnails at the bottom of the screen.

You can jump directly to a defined Detail by clicking on its thumbnail.

While the Detail feature is a great idea, it is let down by the fact that you can only select a fixed sized area as a Detail, which we found was sometimes too small, and by the fact that once you have defined a Detail, the scanner rescans that part of the drawing. This takes time and subjects drawings to extra passes through the scanner, slowing you down.

Once you are happy with the scan settings in the preview scan, you need to rescan the document using the settings you have chosen. In our opinion, this two step process - preview then scan - is Nextimage's downside, because what you see in the preview is not always what you get in the final scan (see below).

Other useful features

In addition to the ease of selecting scan settings and the Details feature, useful Nextimage features include:

  • Helpful, context sensitive Help.

  • Ability to save in all standard file formats including TIFF, PDF, DWF and JPEG.

  • Automatic paper size detection.

  • Scan settings can be saved with a user-defined name so you can use them again for similar drawings in the future (presets).

  • Batch scanning mode with auto increment of file names. As soon as one drawing has been scanned, another can be loaded and scanned without the need to return to the PC.

  • Fast, useful zoom and pan tools including zoom all, drag a box around the area to zoom into, Ctrl + scroll mouse wheel forward to zoom in, Ctrl + scroll mouse wheel backward to zoom out, drag left mouse button to pan.

    These tools allow you to quickly move around the preview scan to ensure that it's all there, that the correct scan settings have been used, that the text is legible, etc.

  • Easy crop - simply drag the edges of the scan area in the preview to where you want them.

  • Oversize option that lets you add white space around a scanned image. This is useful if you are scanning a document where the content goes right up to the edge.

What you see is not always what you get

Nextimage works on a preview-rescan principle. First, you make a preview scan. You adjust the scan settings until the preview scan looks good. Then you make a final scan using the adjusted scan settings.

We believe that the fact that you have to make image adjustments to the preview, then rescan the drawing, is a disadvantage. We believe it is safer and more efficient to scan the drawing once, then make adjustments to the final scan. This is why:

  • What you see in the preview is not necessarily what you get in the final scan.

    Here are some examples:

    This is what we saw in the preview - an A0 scan in portrait. This is what we got in the scan - an A0 scan in landscape, with the portrait drawing on one half of it. This happened because we had Nextimage's Resize option set to A0 landscape, but this setting was not reflected in the preview.
    This is what we saw in the preview - clean, solid, separated lines. This is what we got in the scan - ragged lines. This happened because we had the scanner resolution set to Turbo mode, but this setting was not reflected in the preview.
    This is what we saw in the preview - joined together lines. This is what we got in the scan - perfectly separated lines. The reason: At 200 dpi, the preview would not let us zoom in far enough to see what we were actually going to get.

    Because Nextimage does not display the scanned image after scanning, we did not always discover that there was a problem until we had made a number of poor scans. This would be disastrous in a situation where the issue was only discovered after hundreds of scans, or when it was no longer possible to rescan the original documents.

  • The preview is not time efficient.

    The preview requires a document to pass through the scanner three times: Once for the preview, once to rewind the document and once for the scan. This takes three times longer than a single scan and also causes unnecessary wear on fragile documents. It is not the most productive way of scanning.

No easy rotate

A0 and Arch E size drawings need to be scanned short side first and so usually need to be rotated by 90 degrees after scanning so they are the right way up. Most scanning software includes an auto-rotate facility to do this and/or a one-click rotate icon.

At present there is no ability to auto-rotate drawings by 90, 180 or 270 degrees in Nextimage. While it is possible to rotate drawings manually, the process is not obvious.

We have been told that Contex are going to add a rotate facility into a future release of Nextimage.

[Contex SD4490 - previous] [Contex SD4490 - next]