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Auto Document Feeder |
A scanner accessory that helps with text scanning. The ADF allows continuous scanning of up to 25 pages of text (depending on the ADF model). The ADF is normally used with an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software program such as ABBYY FineSprint Reader to scan text pages. |
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Bit |
Representing a value of 0 or 1, a bit is the smallest unit of memory in a computer. |
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Bit depth |
The measurement of the amount of color information in an image for display or print. Higher bit depth translates to more color and more accurate color information in the digital image. |
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BMP |
Bitmap images, also called raster images. Bitmap files use a grid of pixels to represent images, with every pixel in an image given a specific location and color value. The number of pixels combined make up the image data. Dependent on resolution, bitmap images are best used to show gradations of color. Bitmap images cannot be enlarged unless you change the resolution first, or the images will blur. |
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Brightness |
The balance of light and dark shades in an image. Brightness is distinct from contrast, which measures the range between the darkest and lightest shades in an image. Brightness determines the intensity of shades; contrast determines the number of shades you get. |
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Byte |
The smallest amount of computer memory needed to store one character of data. |
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CCD |
Charge Coupled Device. The "eye" of the scanner that converts light waves into digital information. |
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CMYK |
Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black; the base colors in the printing process. When printing, you should change the color mode for your images to CMYK to give them a better representation of colors. |
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Color Calibration |
The process of ensuring accurate reproduction of color for images. Full color calibration is usually a two-step process: calibrating your input device, such as a scanner; and calibrating your output device, such as a printer or monitor. By calibrating input and output devices correctly, color is accurately captured by your scanner and is reproduced faithfully on your monitor or printer as well. |
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Compression |
To compress is to decrease in size. Compressing a file makes it smaller and makes it take up less space on a hard drive or other storage device. |
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Contrast |
The relationship between the light and dark areas of an image. Contrast is the range between the darkest and lightest shades in an image, while brightness is the balance of light and dark shades. Contrast determines the number of shades you get; brightness determines the intensity of the shades. An image with low contrast tends to look dull and flat. |
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Descreen |
A filter used to remove dotted or "crosshatch" patterns (a.k.a. moire patterns) that generally occur when scanning images from newspapers or magazines. |
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Display technology |
The type of technology used for desktop displays, such as CRT (cathode ray tube) or LCD (liquid crystal display). Other forms of display technology include LED (light-emitting diode) and gas plasma. |
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Dot pitch |
The measure of how much space there is between a monitor display's pixels. Smaller is better, and packing pixels closer together is fundamental to achieving higher resolution. |
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DPI |
Dots per inch; the measurement of resolution. DPI equals the number of dots that fit horizontally and vertically into a one-inch measurement. Typically, the higher the dpi, the more detail in an image. DPI varies, depending on the output device. A web-page resolution is almost always 72 dpi; a printer 300-1440 dpi (varying according to the printer). |
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Driver |
An integral piece of software that provides a computer the necessary information to communicate with a peripheral device. For example, you must install a specific driver for each device (printer or scanner) attached to your computer. Most peripherals that are sold come with the driver stored in a disc, or the drivers are available by visiting the company's website for downloading. |
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Dynamic Range |
The difference between the minimum and maximum tonal values that a scanner can register. This measurement is expressed on a scale ranging from 0 (white) to approximately 4.3 (black) A scanner with good dynamic range is able to map input shades correctly to output shades, making images look brighter and giving them more visible detail. Generally, the number of bits determines the maximum dynamic range of a scanner. For example, a 42-bit scanner has a higher dynamic range than a 36-bit scanner. |
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E.D.I.T. |
Emulsion Direct Imaging Technology. A patented Microtek design, this technology allows for scanning directly from the surface of the film without an interfering pane of glass. With E.D.I.T., distortions of the scanned image (including Newton Rings) are eliminated. |
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Exposure |
The amount of light in an image. The exposure of an image can be changed by increasing or reducing available light. |
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File format |
The way a graphic file is saved. Several file formats are available for use, and each one has its own advantages and disadvantages. The most popular file formats include TIFF, PICT, EPS, and PCX. TIFF is the most widely used file format. |
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Filters |
Tools that allow you to apply or create special effects to your images. Filters in your scanning software include Blur/Blur More, Sharpen/Sharpen More, Emboss, and Edge Enhancement. |
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FireWire |
Also known as IEEE 1394, FireWire is a relatively new, high-performance, low-cost interconnection standard that supports data transfer of up to 400 million bits per second. Devices with a FireWire interface are "hot-swappable", allowing them to be plugged and unplugged at will from other connected devices without needing to turn them on or off and without affecting performance. |
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Gamma |
The contrast affecting the mid-level grays or midtones of an image. Adjusting the gamma of an image allows you to change brightness values of the middle range of gray tones without dramatically altering the shadows and highlights. |
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GIF |
Graphic Interchange Format. A file format for use mostly with graphic images on the Internet, GIF files are often smaller than JPEG files of the same size and as a result, do not store photographic images as well. GIF is best used for storing images with large blocks of solid color, such as a logos or lettering. |
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Gigabyte |
A measurement of storage capacity. One gigabyte equals 1,024 megabytes. |
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Grayscale |
An image type that contains more than just black and white, and includes actual shades of gray. In a grayscale image, each pixel has more bits of information encoded in it, allowing more shades to be recorded and shown. 4 bits are needed to reproduce up to 16 levels of gray, and 8 bits can reproduce a photo-realistic 256 shades of gray. |
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Halftone |
A type of single-bit image composed of a pattern of black dots that fool the eye into seeing shades of gray. Examples of halftone images are the pictures you see in a newspaper. These images usually look very coarse. |
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Highlights |
The lightest portions of an image. |
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Histogram |
A graphic representation of how bright and dark pixels are distributed in an image. A histogram skewed heavily to the left indicates a dark image, while a histogram skewed to the right indicates a bright image. |
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Hue |
The characteristic of a color that distinguishes it from another color; i.e., what makes a color red or green or blue. |
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Image-editing software |
Software that is used to edit images, such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe PhotoDeluxe, and Ulead PhotoImpact. |
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Imagesetter |
An output device used to render high-resolution images or documents on photographic paper or film. |
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Interpolated resolution |
Resolution enhanced through software; also known as software-enhanced resolution. Interpolated resolution may capture less detail than optical resolution, but it is useful for certain tasks, such as scanning line art or enlarging small originals. |
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JPEG |
Joint Photographic Experts Group. As a file format, JPEG can shrink files down to about 5% of their original size. Some amount of detail, however, is lost in the compression. |
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Line art |
A type of single-bit image that is purely black and white, such as a pencil or ink sketch. Line art may also include one-color images, such as mechanical blueprints or drawings. |
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Lossless compression |
A type of file compression in which images can be shrunk to a smaller file size without losing any image quality. In compressing these files, however, the amount of colors is reduced to 256, and as a result, some images will not look right (especially photographs with continuous color). TIFF and GIF are examples of files that feature lossless compression. |
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Lossy compression |
A type of file compression in which files are reduced with parts of the image permanently removed. When considering this option, one must consider the chjoice of saving file space by making the file smaller and potentially losing detail, or leaving the file as a larger iimage size and retaining image quality. |
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Lines per inch |
The resolution of printed images. Lpi is distinct from dpi, which measures the resolution of electronic images. |
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Maximum monitor resolution |
The number of individual dots of color, or pixels, contained on a display. Resolution is typically expressed by measuring the number of pixels on the horizontal axis (row) and the number of pixels on the vertical axis (column); e.g., 640x480. |
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Megabyte |
A unit of computer memory capacity equal to 1,048,576 bytes. |
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Midtones |
The parts of an image between the lighter and darker areas, at around 50% gray. |
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Moire |
An undesirable pattern in color printing that results from incorrect screen angles of overprinting halftones. Moires usually result when you scan a halftone or when you scan images taken directly from a magazine (instead of scanning a photographic original or a transparency). |
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Newton Rings |
A series of concentric circles that appear on a scanned image when a thin layer of air exists between the glass scanner bed and the image being scanned. Newton rings appear when light waves are reflected from both top and bottom surfaces of the air between the glass and the image, interfering with the resulting scan. To resolve this problem, Microtek developed the patented Emulsion Direct Imaging Technology (E.D.I.T.) for its scanners. |
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OCR |
Optical Character Recognition, or software used when scanning text to creat a text file that can be edited directly in a word processor (such as Microsoft Word). |
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Optical resolution |
The true sampling that is being captured by the scanner's CCD; thus, the true resolution of a scanner (as opposed to interpolated). Optical resolution represents the amount of detail in an image before any software manipulation has taken place. |
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Parallel |
An interface used for connecting hardware to your computer. |
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Portable Document Format created by Adobe Systems featuring Adobe Acrobat as a universal browser. PDF saves formatting information from many desktop publishing applications so that a document appears to the recipient as it is intended. |
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Pixel |
A picture element, or a single unit of a graphic image used by the computer to represent image information in a digital format. An image file, for instance, is simply a representation of hundreds (or thousands) of pixels arranged closely together in a grid so that they appear to form a picture. |
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Printing methods |
The type of printing method you choose should be tailored according to your scanned image. For instance, low-resolution black-and-white printers are good for producing text and line art, but they are not suitable for grayscale. For grayscale, use higher-resolution printers such as the ones capable of producing 600 to 1200 dpi. To print color images, you can choose from ink jet or desk jet color printers, dye-sublimation printers, or printing presses. |
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Refresh rate |
The number of times that the image on the monitor display is drawn each second. If the monitor has a refresh rate of 75 Hz, all the pixels from top to bottom are cycled at 75 times a second. Refresh rates are important because they control flicker, and higher refresh rates are better to eliminate eye strain and headaches that result from low refresh rates and flickering. |
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Resolution |
The level of detail in an image, expressed in dots per inch or dpi. The greater the dpi number, the higher the resolution and the resulting file size. |
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Reflective media |
Media capable of reflecting light; e.g., photographs, magazine prints. |
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RGB |
Red, Green, Blue. A color model in which every color is composed of a varying amount of the colors red, green, and blue. |
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Saturation |
The intensity of a color, or the degree of color in a particular hue. For example, the green leaves in a tree will appear "more green" if the color is saturated. |
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Scaling |
The process of creating larger or smaller images in ScanWizard, so that the images don't have to be resized later when they are delivered to the image-editing program. Scaling has an inverse relation to resolution: The lower the resolution, the larger the image can be scaled. At the highest resolution, images can only be scaled smaller. |
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Scan material |
The type of material for your image. Scan materials can be generally classified into three types: reflectives, such as photographs or prints; positives, such as slides; and negatives, like the negative film used in cameras. |
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SCSI |
Small Computer System Interface. An interface standard capable of data transfer speeds of up to 80 megabytes per second. |
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SCSI chain |
A chain that links SCSI devices on your system. A SCSI chain may include such devices as a scanner, a CD-ROM drive, an external hard drive, and a tape drive. Each SCSI device on the chain must have its own SCSI ID number, or conflict will ensue. |
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Shadows |
The darkest areas of an image. |
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Single-bit image |
The simplest kind of image, using just one bit of data to record each pixel. Single-bit images come in two types: line art, and halftone. |
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Terminator |
A special resistor pack or a block of resistors that tells the computer where the end of the SCSI chain is and ensures the electrical integrity of the bus signals. Terminators act as a filter to clear out electrical "noise" caused by multiple cables and devices. |
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Text scanning |
One of the most common uses for scanners, as it eliminates the need for retyping. Scanners scan text through the use of OCR software and deliver text to your word processor. For multiple-page text scaninng, the use of a scanner accessory called an Auto Document Feeder is recommended. |
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TIFF |
Tagged Image File Format. The most popular file format used today, TIFF files are good for storing bitmap images. Since it is supported by most image-editing software, it is recommended to use TIFF when sharing files between firms and team members. |
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Transparent Media |
Media through which light can be transmitted without being scattered; e.g., negatives, slides, transparencies. |
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Transparent Media Adapter |
A scanner accessory used for scanning transparencies, slides and filmstrips. The TMA has a unique lighting device that prevents transparent originals from being exposed to too much light and getting washed out as a result. |
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TWAIN |
A software industry standard that allows software applications and hardware imaging devices to communicate directly. ScanWizard for Windows is a TWAIN-compliant program, which means it can be used with other TWAIN-compliant applications like Adobe Photoshop. In practical terms, this means that when a scan is performed through ScanWizard, the scan is automatically placed inside Photoshop. |
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Unsharp Masking |
A useful tool which makes the edges of different colors in an image sharper, bringing out detail and sharpening an image. Almost every image benefits from the use of unsharp masking. |
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USB |
Universal Serial Bus. An external peripheral interface standard that supports data transfer rates of 12 million bits per second. |
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Zip |
A data compression format. Files that have been compressed with this format are called zip files and often end with a .zip extension.
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