Hey, Got a question for y'all... At this biochem lab they want to buy a slide scanner, and I recommended the Nikon Coolscan III, since I used it briefly last year for website construction. However, they want the slide scanner for what people use regular scanners for. They want to scan slides of presentation graphs and the like and have the computer recognize that stuff. The question is, will this scanner do that job? I'm assuming it would, but I figure they'd be less than happy to find out it didn't... Thanks P

-- Pouya Shahbodaghi (pouya@bu.edu), July 13, 2000

Answers

First of all, what a waste of a decent scanner! Are you sure that the presentation slides they're talking about are 35mm, and not OHP slides?

In any case the computer will not automatically be able to turn graphs back into data simply by scanning them in. No scanner will do that. You can semi-automate the process by using the trace function of Corel Draw, or some other drawing packages, but some human intervention will always be required to translate the arbitrary x,y co-ordinates you get from the scan to real values. (I know, I spent 2 hours last night transferring a graph from a PDF document into a spreadsheet!)

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), July 14, 2000.