I have an ancient Epsom GT-3500 scanner which still does pretty well
everything I want ok. I need a flat bed type for scanning things other
than sheets of paper.

However, I only use it with my RISC OS computer via the SCSI port - I
can't find any software/drivers that allows it to work with the PC via its
parallel port. I *think* it came with a PC SCSI card - but since I didn't
have a PC at the time long since gone, as is any PC software for it.

The problem is scanning old car wiring diagrams out of the handbook, etc.
If I do this in pure B&W - regardless of resolution and other settings, I
get a poor quality image. Scanning in grey gives excellent results -
except you can now see the paper 'colour' which often varies according to
how it has been exposed to daylight etc in use.

I could transfer the untreated image from the scanner to the PC, and I do
have things like Photoshop, but haven't really played with it much.

Any simple way to get a clean B&W image?

--
*What do little birdies see when they get knocked unconscious? *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

The problem is scanning old car wiring diagrams out of the handbook, etc.
If I do this in pure B&W - regardless of resolution and other settings, I
get a poor quality image. Scanning in grey gives excellent results -
except you can now see the paper 'colour' which often varies according to
how it has been exposed to daylight etc in use.

I could transfer the untreated image from the scanner to the PC, and I do
have things like Photoshop, but haven't really played with it much.

Any simple way to get a clean B&W image?

In GIMP I'd take the greyscale image and use use Colours Threshold,
adjust the slider to pick a good point for the black/white split, then
save as some form of B/W image. I'm sure Photoshop has a similar filter.

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
I have an ancient Epsom GT-3500 scanner which still does pretty well
everything I want ok. I need a flat bed type for scanning things other
than sheets of paper.

However, I only use it with my RISC OS computer via the SCSI port - I
can't find any software/drivers that allows it to work with the PC via its
parallel port. I *think* it came with a PC SCSI card - but since I didn't
have a PC at the time long since gone, as is any PC software for it.

The problem is scanning old car wiring diagrams out of the handbook, etc.
If I do this in pure B&W - regardless of resolution and other settings, I
get a poor quality image. Scanning in grey gives excellent results -
except you can now see the paper 'colour' which often varies according to
how it has been exposed to daylight etc in use.

I could transfer the untreated image from the scanner to the PC, and I do
have things like Photoshop, but haven't really played with it much.

Any simple way to get a clean B&W image?

Invest a tenner in an old USB scanner off ebay.

In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
I have an ancient Epsom GT-3500 scanner which still does pretty well
everything I want ok. I need a flat bed type for scanning things other
than sheets of paper.

However, I only use it with my RISC OS computer via the SCSI port - I
can't find any software/drivers that allows it to work with the PC via
its parallel port. I *think* it came with a PC SCSI card - but since I
didn't have a PC at the time long since gone, as is any PC software
for it.

The problem is scanning old car wiring diagrams out of the handbook,
etc. If I do this in pure B&W - regardless of resolution and other
settings, I get a poor quality image. Scanning in grey gives excellent
results - except you can now see the paper 'colour' which often varies
according to how it has been exposed to daylight etc in use.

I could transfer the untreated image from the scanner to the PC, and I
do have things like Photoshop, but haven't really played with it much.

Any simple way to get a clean B&W image?

Invest a tenner in an old USB scanner off ebay.

I'd then be in problems finding a USB driver for RISC OS. I still use that
for the majority of things. It's got software I've learned to use and
can't be arsed learning new for no real reason.

The Epson was the Rolls Royce scanner of its day and still does most of
the things I need well.

--
*You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

On 21/08/2010 11:41, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
The Epson was the Rolls Royce scanner of its day and still does most of
the things I need well.

I know what you mean. I prefer to hold on to good things as well.

About ten years ago I bought a UMAX scanner (Astra 1200S - probably not
a rolls royce, but decent enough) for use with my chosen desktop OS,
Windows NT4.0. It was supplied with a dodgy DTC ISA SCSI card, but the
UMAX driver thankfully also works with an Adaptec 2940UW SCSI card - the
mainstay SCSI card of choice for that era.

The UMAX supplied SMPS power unit was a bit finger touch leaky on the
output ground connection so I slung that back at UMAX and they sent a
replacement which also fried me :-( So I found a cheap uniross linear
supply useable until the caps in that died - and am now back to a modern
SMPS which doesn't have leakage issues.

So 10 years has developed a better power supply filter(!), but scans
from this scanner are as good as others I've seen of a similar equipment
spec. It's also seen good scanning use in my succesive operating system
upgrades to Windows 2000 and Windows XP - where Microsoft thoughtfully
included a WIA driver so I could even ditch the UMAX bundled scanning
software and use Microsoft's own scanning wizard.

And then UMAX decided to 'End-Of-Life' (EOL) the scanner, Microsoft
dropped the driver support in Windows 7 and this thing was looking for
either sole use in Linux or hitting the rubbish pile, like my Matrox
Rainbow Runner Studio capture card - never survived the move to XP or my
dreams to be alternatively usable in Linux.

"Never give up, Never surrender!"... :-)

I found a useful post[1] on the net on hacking the microsoft WIA drivers
preinstalled on Windows XP, into something that would install on Windows
7. Happilly that works.

Similary my Panasonic Laser Printer KX-P7510 (network version of
KX-P7500) was EOL'd by Panasonic before the launch of Windows XP, but
the previous Windows 2000 drivers worked there. Now that printer is
running fine on Xerox's Global PCL6 Printer driver[2] in Vista and
Windows 7, but latterly only when printing from applications installed
into Windows 7 (word, excel etc..) but strangly not from built in
wizards. Ummm. Windows 7 bug to squash sometime.

And.... I recently recompiled a driver[3] and bought to life an old (10
years old probably as well) 802.11b Cisco wireless laptop network card
that originally only had support of WEP encyption, but is now (mainly
due to the work of other interested airo-wpa coders) usable in 10.04 LTS
with WPA without the kludge of ndiswrapper.

It's a shame that obsolescence is enforced by the non-availabity of
drivers, manufacturers sitting on non-interest and NDA rather than open
sourcing things that could still have a life. They do want folks to
spend more money buying almost identical hardware in some cases.

And don't get me started on the piles of 'dead' freeview set top boxes
out there ...

:-(

Links (and model numbers) for the comfort of google'er out there

[1] - Astra 1200S driver for Windows Vista and Windows 7
http://www.fixya.com/support/t153095..._1200s_scanner

[2] - KX-P7500 / KX-P7510 works with Xerox Global Print Driver
http://www.office.xerox.com/software...iver/enus.html

[3] - Cisco Aironet 350 with airo-wpa driver and Network Manager
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1514304

Oh, opps - that was a long one.... ;-)

--
Adrian C

On 21/08/2010 11:02, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
I have an ancient Epsom GT-3500 scanner which still does pretty well
everything I want ok. I need a flat bed type for scanning things other
than sheets of paper.

However, I only use it with my RISC OS computer via the SCSI port - I
can't find any software/drivers that allows it to work with the PC via its
parallel port. I *think* it came with a PC SCSI card - but since I didn't
have a PC at the time long since gone, as is any PC software for it.

The problem is scanning old car wiring diagrams out of the handbook, etc.
If I do this in pure B&W - regardless of resolution and other settings, I
get a poor quality image. Scanning in grey gives excellent results -
except you can now see the paper 'colour' which often varies according to
how it has been exposed to daylight etc in use.

I could transfer the untreated image from the scanner to the PC, and I do
have things like Photoshop, but haven't really played with it much.

Any simple way to get a clean B&W image?


I'm not totally clear as to whether your problem is with doing the
scanning or processing it to black & white.

If you don't have a suitable scanner which works with your RISC m/c,
have you considered using a digital camera to photograph the pages of
interest, and then importing the photos into the computer?

Is the 'coloured' background reasonably uniform? If so, you can use
PaintShop Pro (and probably others) to exchange all instances of one
colour (plus or minus a bit) for another colour - so you could convert
dark grey to black and light grey/yellowish to white (in two operations).
--
Cheers,
Roger
____________
Please reply to Newsgroup. Whilst email address is valid, it is seldom
checked.

In article ,
Roger Mills wrote:
I'm not totally clear as to whether your problem is with doing the
scanning or processing it to black & white.

Could be either.

If you don't have a suitable scanner which works with your RISC m/c,
have you considered using a digital camera to photograph the pages of
interest, and then importing the photos into the computer?

I get an excellent scan in either grey or colour. It's the B&W which is
poor. I don't know if this is because the scanner uses a different
'camera' for this or if it's the software.

Is the 'coloured' background reasonably uniform? If so, you can use
PaintShop Pro (and probably others) to exchange all instances of one
colour (plus or minus a bit) for another colour - so you could convert
dark grey to black and light grey/yellowish to white (in two
operations). --

With old stuff like this the pages have yellowed and often not uniformly
so. And of course the odd fingerprint smudge or so.

What I really need is some 'CSI' software. Feed in a grotty image and it
comes out perfect in seconds. ;-)

--
*The colder the X-ray table, the more of your body is required on it *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

What I really need is some 'CSI' software. Feed in a grotty image and it
comes out perfect in seconds. ;-)

Photoshop.

There's even an option in the "Levels" dialogue box that lets you take
an eyedropper (for say the white level) click on the yellowest part of
the page and the page then miraculously becomes white. If the text is
then too pale, take the black level eyedropper and click on the darkest
part of the text and the text will all change to jet black.

Here you go:

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/levels.htm

Note the "Save" and "Auto" buttons. When you have a histogram that works
for you, you can save it then apply it (Load) to any other scan of a
similar type. Auto tries to optimise the image but can also make a
complete mess of it. However "Undo" always works if it does foul up.

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Roger Mills wrote:
I'm not totally clear as to whether your problem is with doing the
scanning or processing it to black & white.

Could be either.

If you don't have a suitable scanner which works with your RISC m/c,
have you considered using a digital camera to photograph the pages of
interest, and then importing the photos into the computer?

I get an excellent scan in either grey or colour. It's the B&W which is
poor. I don't know if this is because the scanner uses a different
'camera' for this or if it's the software.

Is the 'coloured' background reasonably uniform? If so, you can use
PaintShop Pro (and probably others) to exchange all instances of one
colour (plus or minus a bit) for another colour - so you could convert
dark grey to black and light grey/yellowish to white (in two
operations). --

With old stuff like this the pages have yellowed and often not uniformly
so. And of course the odd fingerprint smudge or so.

What I really need is some 'CSI' software. Feed in a grotty image and it
comes out perfect in seconds. ;-)

Oh. photopaint from Corel will turn faded blothy colour into sharp high
contast greyscale.

Never scam in black and white unless the original is pin sharp.
Far better to even scan grey and then increase the gamma.


est scan in coliur and do colour balance to turn the blotches white.

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

The problem is scanning old car wiring diagrams out of the handbook, etc.
If I do this in pure B&W - regardless of resolution and other settings, I
get a poor quality image. Scanning in grey gives excellent results -
except you can now see the paper 'colour' which often varies according to
how it has been exposed to daylight etc in use.

The scanner driver setting should allow you to select the gamma,
brightness, contrast and the threshold (the cut-off point between white
and black). Your photo-editing application should also allow these
parameters to be adjusted.

Photoshop certainly does. Try using the "levels" feature which permits
you to drag sliders around to set the white level, black level and the
midpoint. This will allow you to edit out the grey cast from the white
paper. Once you have done that you can use Photoshop to resample the
greyscale image into your desired B&W resolution. As a rule of thumb
resample B&W to about four times the resolution of the input greyscale
image.

However, I'd stick with greyscale, once you have mastered the tricks
used for tweaking the output you can get a much better image than you
can using B&W - for example on line drawings B&W can look sharper but is
more jagged. Greyscale can provide an anti-aliased image in which fine
lines and curves are reproduced well on a good colour printer.

You can also get PS to convert greyscale to a clean B&W image. It takes
a bit of playing about with and experience but it's fairly easy to do
once you have mastered editing the threshold and curves and have played
around with the colour mode a few times. I'd make a small test scan of
the sort of image and piddle about with that to get a feel for the
controls.

In article ,
Steve Firth wrote:
The problem is scanning old car wiring diagrams out of the handbook,
etc. If I do this in pure B&W - regardless of resolution and other
settings, I get a poor quality image. Scanning in grey gives excellent
results - except you can now see the paper 'colour' which often varies
according to how it has been exposed to daylight etc in use.

The scanner driver setting should allow you to select the gamma,
brightness, contrast and the threshold (the cut-off point between white
and black). Your photo-editing application should also allow these
parameters to be adjusted.

[snip]

I posted a similar question to a RISC OS group and got the solution.

It seems the RISC OS TWAIN driver is much more limited than the Epson PC
one, so all you basically do is set things for a reasonable image and sort
it out afterwards.

The software I'm using does include lots of filters etc but I've never
really understood them - since I only really do simple stuff.
But the 'Histogram' one allows me to crush the blacks and expand the greys
to peak white, giving exactly what I need, and after a quick play look
like will be fine.

--
*If all is not lost, where the hell is it?

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

In article ,
Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
I have an ancient Epsom GT-3500 scanner which still does pretty well
everything I want ok. I need a flat bed type for scanning things other
than sheets of paper.

However, I only use it with my RISC OS computer via the SCSI port - I
can't find any software/drivers that allows it to work with the PC via its
parallel port. I *think* it came with a PC SCSI card - but since I didn't
have a PC at the time long since gone, as is any PC software for it.

If you have a PC SCSI card, then have a look at vuescan. It's $40 though,
but I reckon it's worth it. http://www.hamrick.com/

You can then import the scanned image into gimp, photoshop, etc.

It even runs under Linux and is far superior to sane, etc.

Any simple way to get a clean B&W image?

You can fiddle with contrast enhancement/threshold levels in GIMP,
photoshop, etc.

Gordon

On 21/08/2010 11:02, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
I have an ancient Epsom GT-3500 scanner which still does pretty well
everything I want ok. I need a flat bed type for scanning things other
than sheets of paper.

However, I only use it with my RISC OS computer via the SCSI port - I
can't find any software/drivers that allows it to work with the PC via its
parallel port. I *think* it came with a PC SCSI card - but since I didn't
have a PC at the time long since gone, as is any PC software for it.

The problem is scanning old car wiring diagrams out of the handbook, etc.
If I do this in pure B&W - regardless of resolution and other settings, I
get a poor quality image. Scanning in grey gives excellent results -
except you can now see the paper 'colour' which often varies according to
how it has been exposed to daylight etc in use.

I could transfer the untreated image from the scanner to the PC, and I do
have things like Photoshop, but haven't really played with it much.

Any simple way to get a clean B&W image?

Have you tried scanning the page with a sheet of black card behind it?

Dave