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Smart, Intelligent, Flatbed-like Scanners?
MessageDrivenBean asks: "In a Windows-based terminal client environment, I'm looking for a smart flatbed-like scanner. It is okay to connect a scanner to a local USB-port and tunnel that scanner to the remote application on the terminal server. But actually scanning a page produces a lot of data and with a small bandwidth connection it takes like 10 minutes to get all the data in the application. Besides, I only need 2 specific small parts of the page in 300dpi, and JPEG is just fine, no need the get raw data. Does Slashdot know of an intelligent scanner that exposes some sort of API to be efficient in a low-bandwidth terminal client environment?"
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Get a networked scanner, hp makes one, and most MFPs will do it too, and set it to scan to a folder, you can even do user login and have user folders with the advanced ones... Then they walk back to the thin client, load up the client software and edit the image from there...
I know PSP9 works in a terminal server environment...
JC
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
Axis (makers of network printer servers, web cameras, etc) also make 'network document servers' - essentially, a small dedicated computer to which you attach the scanner, and then it scans the document and emails the result or makes it available through a small web server: http://www.axis.com/products/axis_70u/index.htm
I'm do a few things in this industry but have not seen anything hardware wise yet that fits exactly what you're wanting.
Some more information would help though, like-
Do the scans need to be in color, greyscale or bitonal?
What quality? 150dpi in color is often very readable and printable. I know you're using 300 but I'm not totally sure you need to.
What exactly are you capturing? text? barcodes? Photos?
Is the Region of Interest (ROI) consistant throughout the documents or does it change position from image to image?
Is any of this being OCR'd?
Are you wanting to use cheap usb scanners or is something more office grade ok? Lots of cheaper scanners don't get faster with lower dpi and some (a low grade agfa comes to mind) don't change speed for region of interest. It varies though.
Small visioneer paperport products do have an api you can buy. They aren't flatbed, just the tiny sheetfed ones. Most scanners do not have available api or controls, only the garbage that comes with them.
If you can avoid color, do so. Scan to TIFF group IV for b+w, most pages will be in the 20-100kb range at 200-300dpi and print out great for text.
The preview mode is usually 72 dpi or less but often the interface won't let you directly save the preview, some require preview and then scan (suck!)
As others suggested, a dedicated station is hard to avoid with scanners, and another option may be a networked copier if you're trying to keep everything thin client style.
Firefox &
I once worked on a pilot for a project to deploy HP Digital Senders to remote locations for scanning documents and uploading them to a central european document archive onto WORM media. They have some useful remote configuration software that makes it easy to manage a "fleet" of them in one go, and they have several different options for user management. They're not cheap however. Might be worth investigating - though I don't know if they're customisable enough for your needs.
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.