WideTEK 25
WideTEK 25 Scanner from Image Access
By Ed Avis
Capital City Reprographics in Lansing, Michigan is located in an area rife with artist studios and galleries, so naturally art reproduction is a key part of their business. Until recently the company used a 13 x 19-inch scanner from Minolta to digitize the originals, but that meant larger paintings had to be scanned in pieces and stitched together.
So the shop invested in a WideTEK 25 scanner from Image Access, which is a flatbed scanner with a 25 x 18.5-inch scan area.
“We needed something to allow us to more easily scan in large pieces, because we do a lot of art reproduction here,” says Eric Hall, managing graphic designer at Capital City Reprographics.
Large-format flatbed color scanning can be an important line of work for a reprographics shop. As color graphics grows in importance for many repro shops, the ability to scan large color objects of various shapes becomes more valuable.
Flatbed Advantages
Flatbed scanners are especially useful for art projects, books, fragile documents, and other items that are not suitable for feeding into a rollfed scanner. Rollfed scanners are faster, and certainly work better for color CAD documents, but sometimes the object to be scanned simply can’t be fed through the narrow mouth of a typical rollfed scanner.
For example, Hall says Capital City Reprographics can scan original pieces of artwork in their frames.
“The depth of field is really nice for our line of work because previously we had to take things out of frames,” he says. “Now I don’t have to do that, so it makes it more convenient for everybody. Removing things from frames is something I’m not wiling to do for customers.”
Flatbed scanners can also handle bound books, fabrics, memorabilia, and any other item that a customer might need scanned.
The key to a flatbed scanner’s success with those large items is management of the depth of field. The cameras themselves are the same CCD (charged-couple device) cameras as found in most roll-fed scanners, but the illumination, optics, and software are designed to capture and manipulate images with larger depths of field.
Several Vendors
A number of vendors make large-format, flatbed scanners.
Contex, for example, offers the 18 x 24-inch HD iFlex scanner. In order to accommodate even larger documents, the HD iFlex is designed to automatically stitch together two scans to create one 36 x 24-inch digital image. Learn more by clicking here.
Image Access makes the WideTEK and Bookeye scanner lines. Like the Contex iFlex, the WideTEK 25 can automatically stitch two scans to create a 36 x 24-inch image. The Bookeye scanners, designed for bound items, come with a special cradle and optics. Learn more by clicking here.
Kurabo makes the K-IS-A1FW flatbed color scanner, which has a 24 x 36-inch scanning area. That large bed allows it to scan a color engineering document – or any other large item – in 20 seconds. Learn more by clicking here.
Conclusion
Most reprographics shops doing scanning work consider their rollfed scanners the workhorses of the shop – they can quickly reduce a pile of original AEC drawings into user-friendly digital files.
But for many specialty applications – from books to artwork to fragile maps – a wide-format flatbed scanner is much more practical.
“The new scanner is really nice – it’s a lot easier to use than what we had been using, and saves us a lot of time,” Hall says. “Everything that’s 18 x 24 or smaller than that barely needs any work at all.”