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We had a Local Planning Officer staying in our B&B recently - on secondment from elsewhere, as we are rather short of them in this neck of the woods - and we had a chat about the current format for submission of planning applications. He told me that hard copy was still the most favoured option, but with a requirement for just three copies rather than the usual six, and that many local architects still favoured the drawing board, producing "more authentic" drawings as they called them!

Should anyone be short of the required number, they were quite happy to scan and reproduce them in-house rather than sending them out to a bureau. Apparently, whilst local government can't afford staff, they are happy to equip offices with the equipment they would have used.

This is all good news for the manufacturers of scanning devices. Despite the growing capability for the transmission and printing of digital documents, there is still a large quantity of large format drawings and images being produced to suggest a healthy future for the technology - quite apart from the need to capture legacy documents to either bring them up to date or archive them. Hence the continuing development of wide format scanning technology, as demonstrated with the latest range of SmartLF SG scanners from Colortrac.

The new range of scanners come in two sizes, 36" and 44", and three modes - monochrome, colour and e (enhanced) with the highest colour scan speed. greyscale. They all use the latest

CCD (Charge Coupled Device) technology with 48-bit colour image capture in colour and 16-bit greyscale to capture sharp detail and accurate colour from drawings, maps and other documents used by architects, engineers and GIS professionals.

CCD LED VERSUS FLUORESCENT
The CCD technology they use is exactly the same as that used in the latest cameras, with superior colour imaging and a wide colour gamut. They also have a high dynamic range - the ability to see detail in dark and light areas - essential for picking up detail from faded building plans, and 1200dpi optical resolution (with interpolated resolutions of 9600dpi), the highest available in any CCD wide format scanner on the market today.

Colortrac CCD scanners have other advantages as well. Traditionally, scanning light sources have been fluorescent lighting systems. Although users normally expect to wait five minutes after they have been switched on for them to warm up, in reality it takes about half an hour for the fluorescent tubes to reach their optimum light intensity and for tube temperatures to reach equilibrium. Using them earlier than this risks colour matching and stitching inaccuracies caused by the still cold chassis.

The Colortrac scanners use ClearView white LED illumination in their SmartLF scanners, producing the same quality of scans that you would get from a fluorescent tube based scanner, but straight from switch on to power down. The colour temperature from LEDs remains stable throughout the scanners operation, and eliminates any waiting for warm-up before they can be used.

And yet further advantages. Fluorescent tubes normally need replacement every year or two, and have to be left on whilst the scanner is switched on, whilst LEDs only need to kick in during the actual scanning process, and are expected to have a long life - estimated to be 50,000 hours, or six years of constant 24/7 scanning! Fluorescent tubes, because of aging tubes and their varying operating tendencies, require frequent calibration. LEDs maintain consistent output and require considerably less maintenance. They are also more environmentally friendly as they don't contain mercury, found in fluorescent tubes.

ENHANCED PERFORMANCE
It's not just the light sources that determine the quality of the scan. The CCDs scan successive bands of the image that have to be stitched together accurately. Stitch and scan accuracy issues can occur if the CCD sensors are misaligned. The SmartLF scanners eliminate much of the problem by housing six CCDs in a rigid monocoque camera chassis, helping to minimise geometric distortion.

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