On Sun, 26 Jun 2011 13:36:15 +0100, John Williamson wrote:

They don't look like typical scanner noise.

The surface the manifold is laying on looks like some form of
brushed
metal, as I see it the "noise" in those areas are the "brush"
marks.

Which doesn't explain the speckles on the manifold area, ...

Has another look, ha yes got distracted by the colour cast and
exposure of the Plustek image...

... which look like dust and small lengths of fibre on the scanner
glass.

I'd agree with that. The white speckles are not single pixels (this
is bitmap image remember). Take a look at them in the area bounded
by:

1221,1984 1356,1892 a lovely twisty white fibre and a hair sticking
up from the manifold.

or

1019,2258 1086,2204 a black twisty fibre overthe background.

One may have to fiddle with those co-ordinates the are supposed to be
upper left/lower right but the numbers might depend on where your and
my image viewing packages start counting from...

--
Cheers
Dave.