Lightning Scan GS review
By Richard Bennett
Copyright (c) 1990 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
Being the happy owner of a "Thunderscan" from Thunderware, I simply ignored the various advertisements for "Quickie" from Vitesse and "Lightning Scan" from Thunderware. After all, I already had a scanner for my Apple II. At least I thought I did, until I saw it demonstrated at the August Apple II main meeting!
A scanner allows you to digitize pictures, whether they contain graphics or text, and save them on your Apple as graphics screens. You can then use John Maclean's "The Graphic Exchange" to transfer, edit, and scale your graphics for use as clip art in a desktop publishing program, or a paint program. The programmers at Beagle Bros. have also recently released an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program that apparently reads super-hires and "Quickie" scanned images, and converts them into text. Whether this works with the "Lightning Scan" yet, I don't know.
The Thunderscan replaces your Imagewriter ribbon cassette, and plugs into your paddle port. You then feed the image to be scanned, through your printer. A nifty piece of software on the Apple then re-constructs the image. The only real downfall, is the speed of scanning process. If you've ever printed a colour super-hires picture, you'll know how slow the Thunderscan is. But if it's the first time you've ever seen a scanner at work, you'll probably ignore the speed and simply be impressed with the results. After a while however, the fun starts to where off, as it takes so long to do anything with it.
Enter "Lightning Scan". When Cathy Morton showed it off at the meeting, I was impressed. When Andrew Roughan offered it to me for review, I was thrilled. When I got it home and tried it, I was hooked! But that's not to say it hasn't got some faults.
The "Lightning Scan" has all of it's controls on the actual scanner unit, which is now simply dragged over the object to be scanned. This means you can scan any flat object, such as a book, without having to photocopy it first and feed it into the printer. The unit itself fits in one hand, and is just big enough to be annoyingly uncomfortable to hold (for my hands anyway). But considering most of your scanning will probably involve just dragging it around, you probably won't have to actually pick it up much.
The cable is about two metres long, which for a hand held unit is very generous. The Thunderscan cable is about the same length, but only just managed to stretch to my Imagewriter. The cable then plugs into a card in the IIgs. A card?! Yes folks, it's time to go card swapping again!
The scanner is interrupt driven, and requires a phantom slot for a card, which is input to the scanning software when it starts up. The card actually contains another separate PCB about as big as the "shift" key on the keyboard, which screws into the small peripheral port behind slot two, and
connects to the mini-din cable from the unit. Now if you've got any cards in slots one to three, which contain ribbon cables, then you'll probably have to move some of them around to screw it in. I preferred to simply leave the IIgs lid off and let the cable dangle.
The controls on the "Lightning Scan" consist of a "dithering switch", which controls the scanning quality, a "resolution switch", for magnification, a brightness thumbwheel, and a button marked "START". On the "dithering switch", you have three settings called PHOTO, and one called LETTER. The LETTER mode is for line art, or simple black and white, scanning. The three PHOTO settings decide the size of each dot as it is scanned. For most purposes, except for special effects, you'll use the finest mode, which is PHOTO position one. Next to that is the small thumbwheel for controlling the brightness of the scan. The "START" button is placed where your thumb would be if you were holding the unit. Finally, on the other side, is the "resolution switch". The available modes are 100 DPI, 200 DPI, 300 DPI, and the new mode for "Lightning Scan", 400 DPI. The switch affects the size of the image on the screen after the scan. For a full screen, you would use the 400 DPI mode.
Now all you do, is select "New Scan" from the program menu, hit "return", and the scanning is underway. There is an 8cm roller underneath the unit, which calibrates the scanning process. When you drag the unit, and hold down the "START" button, the roller senses the speed and calibrates the scan accordingly. This means you can speed up and slow down without affecting the scan. If you're scanning too fast for it to keep up, a light on the unit flashes and the IIgs beeps to make you slow down. Of course you don't have to, and you can even create special effects by moving the unit " in different ways during a scan.
The software does give you one set of options for the scan. Those being whether to display the image as it is scanned, and how many grey scales to use for the scan. For the grey scales, you have a choice of 16 greys, the default, 10 greys, which leaves 6 extra colours for your paint program or DTP program to use, and the Line Art mode, which is used in conjunction with the "LETTER" setting on the "dithering switch".
The "Lightning Scan" software will only scan your image, adjust the brightness and contrast of the resultant image, and save the image. For extra features, such as adding colour (these scanners don't scan in colour), cutting, printing, or loading previously scanned images, the Thunderscan GS software is included on the disk. And although the unit only works on a IIgs, they have included the original Apple //e version of the software for converting to hires and double hires.
Also included, is a plastic guide which snaps onto the unit. A cheap plastic strip, which they seem to call a "13 inch rule", is also included and fits neatly against the guide. This is to make sure your scans are straight. After about 20
scans, in about just as many minutes, I found that the rule and guide don't really make a difference if you've got a steady hand.
Once again, they've included a sample picture for you to scan, which is impressively more detailed than the sample that came with the Thunderscan. This is used in the manual as a sample scanned image. Which brings me neatly to the manual.
The manual contains descriptions of all three pieces of software, installing the scanner, and the mandatory "care and feeding" section. Missing, is the excellent tutorial which came with the Thunderscan. However the Thunderscan was comparatively quite complicated to get used. The mixtures of the various modes of Thunderscan operation are no longer a problem with "Lightning Scan", as all the switches now make complete sense to the layman, and completely replace the graphical alignment diagrams which the Thunderscan uses. Also, there is no focus procedure on the "Lightning Scan".
And now for the downfalls. It's only four inches wide. In the 16 greys mode at 400 DPI, you can apparently scan up to 55.3 inches in length at a time (655.4 inches at 100 DPI). This is supposed to be for printing and editing purposes. Suppose you want to scan an image 8 inches by 8 inches. You scan the first 4 x 8, and the release the "START" button, then re-position the unit and scan the second 4 x 8 inches. Now you have to use a paint program to join the two sections together. The only cut and paste facility any of the supplied programs support, is a copy section to clipboard. This is great, as you can't get it back out again! Supposedly you then boot up your publishing program and paste the clipboard into your document. However none of the contrast, brightness, or colour settings are kept! A far better method is to save the scanned image as a super hires screen, and load that in through Paintworks Gold or a like program. The alignment is then a lot easier to perform, and you can re-size it if the two sections don't match.
Printing also seems quite useless. Considering you can't modify the image in the program, I can't really see any reason why you'd want to print what you've just scanned. It's probably easier to photocopy it, and the resolution would be better as well! Perhaps for printing onto special cards or letterheads. But there is no way to trim off excess garbage that was also scanned in with the image, so you have to edit it first with a paint program, which then usually has it's own print facilities. You can only print the 8 x 10 inch image currently being displayed, however there is a tile print feature that allows you to print multiple 8 x 10 sections to create a larger image. If you can align it! Apart from that, the print quality is very good, which is probably more to do with the Toolbox Print Manager than anything else.
The disk comes with system 5.0.2, which was a pleasant surprise, and the files can simply be copied off and into a hard disk if necessary. However, there is a temporary
initialisation file on the disk, which attempts to protect the screen memory during the GS/OS boot if you have a ROM 03 IIgs. There was no mention of this in the manual, or whether I should copy it to the */SYSTEM/SYSTEM.SETUP directory on my hard disk. The only reasoning behind it, seems to be for enabling the Quickdraw II Fastport/shadowing when the "Lightning Scan" software runs (Fastport and shadowing, are two of the features which made System Disk 5.0 so fast at drawing!). I checked the software, and it doesn't even use Fastport! Suffice to say I decided to leave it off, and everything still works fine (there is a bug in the init anyway, in that it doesn't protect the entire screen).
Now for the crunch. "How much would you expect to pay?!" Try $xxx! To me, this sounds very expensive for such a seemingly simple unit. You can however, upgrade from the Thunderscan GS for $xxxx. Still with me? A saving of $125 doesn't really seem worth it. After all, at least 90% of the software is already with the Thunderscan, and most people would have already scanned as much as they wanted. But then again you are getting a 400 DPI scanning device! And an incomparable unit in regard to speed and ease of use. An upgrade fee of around $xxx would seem more realistic. Upgrades aside, if you haven't got a scanner already, I'd recommend at least trying the "Lightning Scan". It's about as close as you'll get to a flatbed scanner, which believe me is way way out of the price range of an Apple II owner.

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