MacWorld 2010

At first I did not think I would find the time to make it, but I did, and on a Saturday mind you. Last week was MacWorld 2010 in San Francisco. I went into the show this year not expecting much. I've become accustom to the rapid decline in attendance and quality of trade shows recently. That combined with the fact that Apple was not present, and Adobe not really welcome. I thought the show would be a little light. The show was actually pretty well attended, but the quality of the exhibitors not great. A lot of useless, almost Microsft'ish type clutter: mice, cases, keyboards with silly color coding systems that I'm still trying to figure out the point of and why that would make me more efficient, and an app pavilion that was so scrunched it was impossible to get an idea of what was even going on. There were a few things I would note from the show however.

Eye-Fi. I just like these guys, I like what they are doing, and I am impressed with the technology. Eye-Fi has a product that combines software and hardware embedded on an SD card to give you a way to automatically transfer photos and video from camera to your favorite location as soon as a Wi-Fi connection is available. There are several obvious limitations, but the future potential is outstanding. I don't like that they are tied to the DCIM file-system, but I'm sure that can be overcome.

Fujitsu ScanSnap + Evernote. Really played up their new scanning functionality. I like Everynote's App, but I don't like how proprietary it is. It is not easy ( takes a hack ) to get your documents out of the application. What if you need to use the data somewhere else, or heaven forbid need to migrate? They combined with Fujitsu's talk about there scanner profile on the ScanSnap to scan directly to Evernote now have created a complete personal content management system.

Neat Receipts. Always been a fan of the product. The particular scanner they use I'm very familiar with and have worked with directly on an OEM level. The great part about the scanner is not so much the quality of scan but the form-factor and convenience. As did all the other scanner guys, Neat talked mostly, not about the scanner, but about the software bundled with it. They also have a personal content management system or file cabinet application and they play up their recognition quality. Unfortunately optical character recognition ( OCR ) on the Mac is still not ported to the best version available on PC, so the quality is not great. I found it interesting in the time I was waiting to say hello how many complaints I heard about the business card ( BCR ) and receipt reading accuracy. I felt bad for the guys, but not too much. Vendors like Neat, ReadIRIS, etc. have painted a picture for end-users that is completely incorrect and they of course expect the reading of business cards and receipts to be very accurate, when actually on the desktop level it usually is not. They only hurt themselves with bad market education.

And finally, Microsoft. I found it humors there sarcastic marketing against Apple. Re-iterates the love-hate relationship that exists. It's like two brothers, one makes all the money off what the other creates. They know it, I know it, but we still pretend.

Not too much was said about the iPad at the show. Some companies quickly incorporated a photo or two into their marketing. And there was an amazing lack of Chotchkies. I Covered the show in 1.5 hours, and did not feel bad about the lack of effort. I doubt MacWorld will ever be what it was, but I'm hoping that next year brings more technology and less cases and accessories.

Playing tricks on your images

Often organizations have no control over the images they have received. Images can come via fax which has a varied range of resolutions, or they can come as poor scans. All of which are no good for data capture and OCR processes. Fortunately there are a lot of imaging tools and tricks out there to help. None of these tools replace a good scan but some get close. One of the tools not often thought about is up-sampling.

Up-Sampling is the process of taking an image at a lower resolution and increasing it to a higher resolution. The technology basically increases the resolution of an image then fills in new empty pixels with predicted values from the original image. For data capture and OCR up-sampling is usually done from 150 DPI and 200 DPI to 300 DPI. Up-sampling technologies have become very impressive and useful. I will recommend up-sampling often over working with the source lower resolution. But lets talk about the facts and how and when you should consider up-sampling.

Up-sampling should be considered on documents that have a low amount of noise such as watermarks, spills, stains, stamps, speckling. Essentially documents that are a good quality and scan but low resolution. You should also avoid doing up-sampling on documents with close spacing of elements and text crowding. In these two above scenarios it's better to work with the source image as-is and work around the problems

The bigger the gap between the source resolution and the desired resolution, the more risk of fragments exist after up-sampling. For example 150 DPI to 300 DPI will not yield the quality that 150 DPI to 200 DPI will. This is why going crazy and up-sampling to the highest possible resolution is not a good idea. It's like taking a very small image and trying to zoom in as far as you can to get detail, you probably wont. Trying to trick the system will only hurt you. Up-sampling from 150 DPI to 200 DPI then again to 300 DPI would not be better then just converting to 150 DPI to 300 DPI. In fact this would be a pretty big mistake. Essentially what you do when you do this is magnify the mistakes created during up-sampling as they get propagated now twice over. These will likely decrease you quality and can result in such things as bloated characters, fuzzy characters, or an abundance of speckling. The goal is to do as few conversions on the document as possible.

I will always defer to a proper scan over any image techniques, but when you do not have control of the image scan one of the image tools to consider is up-sampling. Uneducated use of the technology is unsafe as is true with all advanced technologies, but if you stick with the facts, and pick a great technology you will be successful.