Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Monday, January 24, 2005
11:43 - Scanners make heads explode	(top)
It's my belief that the collective intelligence of the flatbed scanner industry has been rapidly and steadily decreasing over the past several years. This is totally aside from the fact that I had to jump through all kinds of hoops to find both a scanner built in the past decade that supports A3-size/tabloid sheets (11x17") and costs less than $3000, and software that will support it (thank you very much, SilverFast, for deciding in your infinite wisdom that the Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL�the only such large-format scanner in the industry, and the direct product-line descendant of the 6400XL, 8600XL, 9600XL, and 9700XL, all of which you supported with your $50 consumer-level software, is in fact suddenly a "Pro" scanner and thus will only be supported by your $500 "Pro" software). Totally apart from all that. See, what I don't get is how a company that has been making scanners for many, many years�very good scanners, in fact, well worth the $1000+ price tags�can have its illustrious engineers' brains seep out onto the floor with the simple passage of time, such that the newest scanners they make, while still being of quite high build and function quality, have completely brain-dead design decisions built into them. Case in point: my Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL. I bought it to replace my old SCSI ScanMaker 6400XL, because my G5 doesn't support the PCI SCSI card that it required (and Mac OS X's SCSI support has been halfhearted and vague anyway). I liked the 6400XL just fine; it was speedy and reliable, and the bed had ruler markings molded into the rails, so I could align a piece of paper or Bristol board quite easily by just butting it up against the raised edges of the scan bed. SCSI though it was, life was good. The new scanner is large-format just like the old one, and it's FireWire-based. And it sold for $1400, same as the old one�and I got it at $1000. What a deal, huh? Until I opened up the lid, and discovered this staring me in the face: See that? See that? See it? The rulers are embedded under the glass. About an inch from the raised edges of the scan bed, on both the left and front edges. Can someone please explain to me exactly what reason in the name of Hell any scanner manufacturer would have to design a scanner in this way? Because the only function it serves, as far as I can tell, is to prevent me from being able to align a piece of paper correctly. I can butt it up against the raised edges, but then an inch of either the top or the side�or both�will be cut off. Or I can gingerly set it manually next to the rulers, so the whole sheet will be visible to the sensor�but then it won't have anything to align against, and will invariably turn out misaligned and send me into a cycle of five or six Preview passes before I get it right. Which is no fun at all when you've got dozens of pages in a batch job that all have to be scanned exactly the same way, with the same margins and registration. What? What am I missing? What possible benefit can this arrangement serve? What graphic-design experts were they who prevailed upon Microtek over the years to abandon their age-old practice of allowing you to align your paper against the guide rails, and instead make you have to float the paper out into the middle of this glass sea, squinting at the light gleaming through the crack between the submerged ruler and the edge of the paper, getting it just aligned as right as you possibly can, closing the lid (and having the wind blow the paper off-alignment in the action), previewing the scan, and finding that it's a couple of degrees rotated from what you wanted? Is this an exercise instituted by Microtek to help us keep our eyeballs sharp and our bile ducts circulating in good health? What possible purpose can this serve other than to piss me off?! It's not as though this is a measure to allow people to scan larger pieces or anything; there is still that raised guide rail, so anything that overlaps over the edges will still be raised as it rests on the rails rather than the glass. And it'll still be blocked out by those stupid rulers. I honestly can't think of a practical reason why this should be. Oh! Oh! And note that there's a little message in the lower right of the scan bed, a note with an arrow pointing to the rectangular clear area between the front ruler and the front guide rail: KEEP THIS AREA CLEAR. Got that? No sticking a ruler in there to line your paper up against. No fair begging out of the pain we have mandated for you as a foolish buyer of large-format scanners, of which ours is the sole occupant of the product category. We are Microtek, and we will find you out! Someone? Anyone? Can someone shed some light on this? I don't like to believe that an entire company can be guided by the ideal of cruelty to its customers, but right now I don't have many other working theories. So, anyway: after dealing with this for months now, and emitting only sporadic grumbles, I have finally come to the conclusion that this situation is untenable, and I have taken firm and decisive action to correct the egregious design of this scanner: Ha! Screw you, Microtek! And thank you to the good people at TAP Plastics, who cheerfully fabricated this thing for me out of 1/8" acrylic. And now I have a paper guide that fits neatly into the corner, covers up the rulers, lets me align the paper, and won't interfere with whatever mechanism it is that can't bear to have that area in the front of the scan bed made opaque. (I assume it's an optical mechanism. Or maybe it's where the Scanner Gnomes play rugby during the course of a scan, an activity crucial to the color-balance process. I don't know.) And that's the end of that chapter.