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From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc,comp.periphs,comp.text
Subject: Re: Document Scanners
Message-ID: <11536@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 15 Jul 88 14:05:31 GMT
References: <424@mcf.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 29

In article <424@mcf.UUCP> shan@mcf.UUCP (Sharan Kalwani) writes:

| A group here has been asked to look into the possibility of taking
| boxes and boxes of medical records and documents and converting them
| into some form of archival storage. They initially considered 
| microfilming them but I feel that using the document scanners with
| perhaps WORM devices would be a better alternative. However, we do not
| have any expeirience in this sort of actitivy at all.

  We evaluated scanners and chose the HP Scanjet, as did InfoWorld last
week. It will run on an AT class machine quite well, and has a
reasonable set of features. Output to a LaserJet is really good, and
quite fast if you use a *parallel* interface.

  This is reasonably labor intensive, and you may want to at least look
at the system Plexus makes to do just what you want. It was demoed at
the UNIFORUM in 87. One of my friends used to sell them and he won a
contract based on cost vs microfilm, so systems like this are cost
effective if you have a big application.

  Warning... the state of character recognition on PCs is such that you
will probably not be able to convert to ASCII, since the error rates
which are normally encountered are not acceptable for medical records
(not mine anyway). I would be pretty happy with the Scanjet stuff,
though, I done a lot of stuff and been very happy with the results.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me