Outback Imaging has unveiled a major upgrade to its leading batch scanning solution, EzeScan, that promises to remove the barriers standing in the way of scanning documents in high resolution in colour for archiving.

The company has introduced new capabilities to its lineup of scanning solutions for Electronic Document and Records Management, also available as a patch update for existing customers under maintenance.

Outback Imaging Managing Director Michael Kirkby said, “Organisations have been able to scan in colour for some time, but high speed scanners are only part of the solution. The scanning software needs to be able to input the images at workable speeds.”

“The enhancements to EzeScan now coupled with the latest scanning and PC hardware now mean that companies have the capability to scan in black and white, grayscale and colour, at input and process speeds previously unobtainable."

EzeScan has responded to a surge in interest from its Australia and New Zealand customers over the past 18 months for high resolution scanning. Until now, the tradeoff for high speed batch scanning has traditionally been to accept resolutions of 150-200 dpi as this was less demanding of bandwidth and storage. As these barriers have been removed, and high speed colour scanners become more widespread, the bottleneck has moved to the batch scanning software that sits at the centre of document workflow.

While 200dpi resolution is acceptable for viewing on screen, it does not produce ideal results when there is a need to reprint a document with a high level of detail, such as a plumbing schematic or electrical drawing .

"We have optimised our code to be able to talk to high speed scanners faster and make 300dpi colour scanning a reality. 200dpi has been the industry standard for some time, but, many optical character recognition (OCR) engines are optimised for 300dpi resolution, so working at 200dpi does not provide optimal results," said Kirkby.

Recent tests with a Canon DR9050C A3 High Speed Production Scanner showed the ability to scan 172 document images per minute at 300dpi in duplex using a TWAIN driver, 86 pages per minute in simplex.

EzeScan code has also been modified to provide faster rendering of QA (Quality Assurance) images as documents are scanned, now provided in full size at A4 instead of as thumbnails.