Adobe or Scanner ?

[Mboatwr]

We use Adobe Acrobat Standard 9 and a Xerox DocuMate 252 scanner to scan legal documents.

In March we started noticing more missed areas in our scans. Lines in charts might be seen but then the numbers are missing, several words may be missing in the middle of a sentence, etc. This behavior may happen on a page and then not again for several pages or may not for the rest of the document or it may occur in several different areas on the same page.

Could this be a driver issue with either Adobe or the scanner? Or is there a setting in Adobe that can be changed to correct this problem?

 

[FredWagner]

Do you regularly (daily!)reboot the PC the scanner is attached to ? Could be a memory fragmentation issue. Are there apps with a pop-up (like email notification) that run on the machine ? turn them off.
How is the disk space on the PC? Defragged it lately ? Scanner is writing to a temp file, and if the disk I/O has to jump all over the drive, it might be causing issues.

Fred Wagner

 

[Mboatwr]

Fred,

I did a defrag last night. I turn my pc off every night -don't believe in just logging off. C drive: 15.4GB used 61.1GB free.

We all have e-mail notification popups. I will turn my off and leave the others as they are and see if my scanning gets any better.

I am really wondering if there hasn't been a change some where in the network or some where that is causing a problem because we didn't have all these problems until after March 1.

At this point I am so frustrated that I have to scan a single page 3-4 times before I get a good image. Plus, it slows me down in getting the boxes scanned.

 

[Mboatwr]

Could downsampling and resolution options help in my scenario of missing images from the scan?

Perhaps someone could explain downsampling to me in simple terms? Does it have any impact on the resolution one selects?

Downsampling deals with size of the file. But what do the numbers really mean: Lowest(600dpi) Low(300) Medium(150)

Resolution: 300dpi 400dpi 600 dpi

I understand that the higher the resolution the higher the quality.

I think the higher the dpi number in downsampling the more material on the page it displays???? I am not sure.
Lowest(600) - 600 doesn't seem to be a low number.

So would one do a resolution of 300 dpi and a downsampling of 600 dpi if you wanted a medium quality scan.

 

[FredWagner]

I never heard of downsampling, can't help you there. Higher resolution = higher quality. I use 300 DPI for good enough quality. Less looks like a FAX to me.
Does your PC have any Windows Updates pending ? both desktops and servers can act squirrely with those downloaded but not installed. there have been a bunch of them since March 1st.
Your scanner is probably connected via USB. Any other USB devices on the PC ? How old is the PC. Supports USB 2.0? What OS ? Win2K, WinXP, Vista, Win7?

Fred Wagner

 

[Mboatwr]

Fred,

Scanner and keyboard are USB; WINXP Professional Version 2002 Service Pack 3. As a matter of fact had updates (security updates for Publisher and WindowsXP-10 of them for both) that triggered to be installed while I was typing this so let them. I have no idea how old the actual PC is.

Downsampling is an option under config presets in Adobe Acrobat and I am not sure what it should be set at to perhaps get a better image or if it has any correlation to resolution. Attached image of the preset window

Downsampling is the process of changing the
resolution of any image from its placed -
This can dramatically decrease the size of a
bitmap image