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When Mark Kiker, director of core technologies for the AEC firm DMJMH+N in Los Angeles, walks up to one of his firm’s large-format scanners, he has a complex series of choices. Scan to print? Scan to file? File in a personal folder or on a networked hard drive? What graphic format to scan in—TIF, JPG, PDF, or another? Increase or decrease image size? Reverse image to make legacy blueprints more legible? Correct for distortion? Scan in color or grayscale?

Luckily, many contemporary scanners have intuitive interfaces that simplify these choices and make the selections easy to execute. But deciding which scanner to buy in the first place is not so simple.

The large-format scanner market has both consolidated and expanded in the past 14 months. Significant feature sets have been introduced, and manufacturers have their sights on making large-format scans more conducive for sharing on the Web. The resulting profusion of scanner choices is hard to keep up with, even for technology gurus.

XES’s XEScan Solution allows scan-to-file, digital archiving, and job accounting. Upgrades allow scan-to-e-mail, monochrome editing, and other features.

Getting a handle on the selection options means keeping up with manufacturers. Some of the most popular manufacturers of large- format scanners include Xerox Engineering Systems (XES), Contex Scanning Technology (the result of a recent merger between Contex Holding A/S and Vidar Systems Corporation), Océ, ACTion Imaging Solutions, and the Japan-based Kyocera Mita. GTCO CalComp, known for its digitizing technology, added a line of large-format scanners in late 2001 and has expanded its offerings in the past few months.

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AEC firms have determined that large-format scanning alone is not a high priority, so manufacturers have responded by creating multifunction machines that scan, plot, and copy documents, and by providing combinable components to meet specific needs. For example, many architecture firms have an independent large-scale scanner linked to a separate large-scale plotter for CAD drawings, connected through a dedicated computer with software for processing, networking, and storage of files that are scanned and saved electronically.

At DMJMH+N, Kiker has a monochrome XES multifunction unit and recently added a single-function device from Contex. But he hasn’t stopped investigating other choices. “XES has a new large-format color scanner that I would seriously look at because of its upgraded feature sets,” Kiker said. His large firm is in need of several devices, and his constant scouting illustrates the profusion of options available.

How do they work?

The digital imaging devices used by scanners are, by and large, charged-couple devices (CCDs), the same technology used in digital cameras. Most large- format scanners use multiple CCDs to scan across the width of a document; the machine then uses internal software to combine and align, or “stitch,” the multiple images together. Two years ago, XES introduced units with complimentary metal-oxide silicone (CMOS) imaging technology, used to create images for silicon-chip manufacturing. This technology allowed XES to create large-format devices with a single optical device for scanning, according to Marc Neiss, XES’s director of technical document solutions. But, depending on the length of the document being scanned, using software to align images may be necessary no matter which type of device is used.