Tech Tuesday - Best Technology?

I often get asked, "What's the best" X, where X can be camera, computer, cellphone, monitor, etc.  I usually ask a few questions about how they intend to use the item in question before making a response, because when it comes right down to it, the way you plan to use a gadget influences which particular one will be best for the purpose.

Photographers have a saying, "The best camera is the one you have with you."  Sometimes this really is the bottom line!  If you have a great laptop at home, but only a smartphone on an outing with you, then your best computer at the moment is the smartphone in your hand, not the laptop at home.  Technology is only good if you can access it.

When I look at purchasing a new piece of gear, I usually do my homework.  I look at what models are available that have the features I want or need.  I look at reviews for each of the options.  I look at various sellers for price and other options.  You've probably seen reviews for products that have a grid of models vs. features, and check marks to show which models have which features.  Sometimes I make my own grid with the things that are important to me.  This is exactly what I did when I bought my first digital camera, and it worked.  I was quite happy with my purchase for several years.  When that changed, it was not the failing of the product, it was a change in my needs that drove me to upgrade.

What's the best scanner?  Depends on what you want to scan.  Does it need to be portable?  Do you need large format?  Figure out what your needs are, then comparison shop.  What's the best genealogy software?  It'll take some research to find out!  Which has the best source citation?  Which has the best chart output?  Fortunately, you have a great genealogy blogging community to help.

Tech Tuesday – Have you stumbled upon a piece of technology or new Web-based application that would be of interest to your fellow genealogy colleagues? Post at your blog on Tech Tuesday and show us the ins and outs of this technology and how it can benefit the genealogy community.  This is a new series suggested by Donna Peterson of Hanging with Donna and in the past there have been many iterations of this series: the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) blog Narations as well as The Family Curator by Denise Levenick.  (Blurb shamelessly stolen from Thomas McEntee at Geneabloggers!)

Technology Tuesday - Scanners

I wonder how many other posts were prompted by the Scanfest on Sunday?  We try to get some scanning done, but we spend a lot of time discussing related things!  We had over 40 people active this time.

Toward the end, there were a few of us discussing different scanners.  Someone was using a document feeder on theirs, someone else had some artifacts (errors) in their scans at high resolutions.  Some were scanning slides or negatives.  Someone had a new wide format scanner.  Several had the portable Flip Pal scanner.  We talked brands and model lines as well. 

So, what are some of the types of scanners out there, and why should I choose one type over another?  Excellent question!

Most people are familiar with the traditional flatbed scanner, where your document is laid on a glass surface, a cover lowered over that, and the scanner does the magic stuff to get your document into the computer in a graphic image format.  There are a number of choices within this type: what size of platen (glass)?  What size of the case, overall?  What scanning resolution, what lighting type?  Can it also do slides and/or negatives?  What's the overall quality of the unit?

Like most technology gadgets, many manufacturers have both a low-end consumer-grade product, and a more expensive, more feature-laden 'pro' or high-end product, and sometimes several models in each line.  The low-end models are primarily intended to compete on price, while still fulfilling the basic requirements of the product type.  High-end models have many more bells & whistles.  A basic flatbed scanner will have a platen sufficient to scan a full Letter or A4 page, will have a cathode light source, and some basic software to control it all.  Frequently the low-end devices will also have smaller cases, appealing to those with limited space.  A high-end flatbed will have a larger platen, maybe legal size or a wide format.  It may have an LED-based light source.  It will sometimes be faster.  It will likely also have built-in capability for scanning slides and/or negatives.  The unit may be physically larger than the low-end cousins.

Some scanners are part of an all-in-one device with printer, scanner and fax capabilities all in one box.  These also function as copiers.  The printer sections can be either inkjet or laser.  Inkjets will be cheaper, and have color, while the laser-based units are generally monochrome, and faster.  Some people like these all-in-one units because a single device fills many functions, and saves space in the home office.  My personal take is that these units are more finicky, and not as good a choice when multiple people must share the unit.  What's more, failure of any part pretty much means replacing the whole unit, as they're rarely repairable in any economical sense. 

An interesting scanner attachment (some have it built-in) is a document feeder.  This lets you place a stack of documents on it, and it feeds the scanner for you, allowing you to get other things done.  For uniform documents in good condition, this works pretty well.  For odd sizes, or documents with problems like dog-eared corners, creases, staples or tears, the document feeders can jam, or mishandle the document.  Sometimes this can damage the document.  For that reason, I do not recommend using them on documents that cannot be easily replaced.  They are also not useful for photographs, as they typically require feeding around rollers.  Some older photos can crack when flexing that much, and some are printed on a stock too heavy to roll.

I mentioned the Flip Pal portable scanner, and there are also other portable units.  They vary in size, but the Flip Pal will to a 10"x6" image.  Obviously that's not even a full letter page, but the small size does make the device quite portable.  Fortunately, it includes software that can stitch together multiple scanner passes to cover a larger document or photo.  This unit seems to be quite popular among genealogists on-the-go.

Software is another thing that varies with scanners.  All of them will come with driver software to allow your operating system to connect to and communicate with the scanner.  Most also include some kind of image editing software and maybe some sort of image organization software as well.  Higher-end units may also include Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software for transcribing documents to text files of various formats.

I mentioned light sources earlier.  Most typical scanners use a cold cathode tube much like a fluorescent light, similar to the backlight in many flat panel monitors and laptop screens.  Some newer scanners use white LED's for the light source, as do some newer flat panels and laptops.  Why would you choose one over the other?  Cathodes have a warm-up time, that is, they need time to stabilize their light output once turned on.  This is why many scanners make you wait to scan.  LED's are an instant-on technology, and the light output is immediately stable, requiring no warm-up time at all.  LED's also have a 50,000 hour rated life, where a cold cathode tube is frequently rated for around 5,000 hours.  5,000 hours is still many years of normal use, so may not be a big issue unless you plan to run your scanner a lot.  The biggest plus to LED's is the lack of warm-up time and stable color output.

My personal choice is a typical high-end flatbed scanner, the CanoScan 8800F.  This model has been replaced recently by the 9000F with a few enhancements to the features, but essentially the same thing.  It has LED lighting, and includes the ability to scan both slides and negatives.  It does not have a document feeder.  The platen is larger than Letter/A4 size, but not quite legal size.  It came with Photoshop Elements 5.0 for Windows (4.0 for Mac), and Omnipage LE OCR software.  It also includes Canon's MP Navigator software which includes an organizer.  The connection to my computer is USB 2.0 based, as are most scanners now.  (Older scanners used Parallel ports or SCSI, or even a proprietary interface that required installing a card in the computer!)  I would strongly recommend it as a very good all-purpose scanner.  The only possible drawback is that it's not portable at all.

What are you using to scan documents and photos?  Do you like your choice?  What would you choose differently, next time?  Discuss in the comments below!

Related posts: 
Scanning Technology
Digitizing With Cameras, Part I
Digitizing With Cameras, Part II

Tech Tuesday – Have you stumbled upon a piece of technology or new Web-based application that would be of interest to your fellow genealogy colleagues? Post at your blog on Tech Tuesday and show us the ins and outs of this technology and how it can benefit the genealogy community.  This is a new series suggested by Donna Peterson of Hanging with Donna and in the past there have been many iterations of this series: the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) blog Narations as well as The Family Curator by Denise Levenick.  (Blurb shamelessly stolen from Thomas McEntee at Geneabloggers!)

UPDATE: Yeah, Blogger screwed up and posted this immediately even though I told it to hold it until Tuesday morning.  You get an early read, enjoy!

Tech Tuesday - Digitizing With Cameras, Part II

I apologize for the delay.  I had originally intended to write and publish this entry  for last week, but participation in a 50-hour Trivia Marathon over last weekend wiped me out.  Hopefully the wait will have been worth it!

I re-read the first part of this topic in preparation for writing this part, and I think I should revisit my comments on lighting.  Using your camera's flash is almost never a good option, and should be a last resort.  Any light that is at too small an angle to the lens opening will result in reflections and glare, which is why I used the reflectors at 45 degrees off.  That position is least likely to result in any reflections.  An external flash that can be bounced off of a white surface would possibly be a workable alternative.  Really, though, the setup I suggested will work best for very little money.  It's pretty much what professional copy stands have, in a poor-man's DIY version.  You might look at school auctions, they sometimes part with old equipment and might have a real copy stand for cheap.

Okay, having said that, and having somewhat described my setup in Part I, here's a shot of how I lay it out as an example:

Two DIY reflector lights on tripods, and a neutral colored base/background.

As you can see, I have the cheap reflector lights simply clamped on a couple of old tripods I had around.  They currently have GE Reveal incandescent bulbs in them, but you could just as well use CFL bulbs and save some energy.  (Incidentally, I've used these same lights for an impromptu photo studio to shoot portraits, they worked well enough for the purpose, given what I paid for them).  The black material is simply a bed sheet I got on sale somewhere.  You'll want to use a neutral color like black, white or grey, as opposed to a color that might alter the color of your materials.  When I did the Scrapbook for Part I, I had a white sheet of tagboard as my base.  I've laid the base on the floor, set the lights approximately the same distance from each side aimed about 45 degrees onto the desired area, set the object to shoot in place, and stood over it shooting vertically down.  It's important to shoot as close to vertical as you can manage, as any slant will give you a keystone effect to rectangular objects, like this:

Shot vertical - all sides parallel.

Shot at an angle - sides keystoned - slanted in to top!

You'll note the absence of reflections in this image - there is glass in the frame!  The 45 degree angle works.






















This example is pretty exaggerated to show you what I mean, but even slight keystoning becomes noticeable when you start cropping in for size, or to isolate images from a multi-image page.

As I mentioned before, you want to use RAW format if your camera supports it, or if not, immediately convert your image from JPG to TIFF before you do any editing.  Also, if your camera has a setting, make sure you set it for the correct white balance.  Incandescent bulb usually have a preset you can use, and fluorescent tubes do as well, but if you have CFL blubs in your reflectors, DO NOT use the fluorescent setting for those, as they're made to mimic the color balance of regular incandescent bulbs in most cases.  Use the incandescent setting instead.  Better still, if your camera allows, use a custom white balance for your particular setup and lamps.  Check your camera's manual for how to set the white balance on your particular camera.  You'll note the images of the picture in the frame above are somewhat yellow-looking; this is because I didn't set my white balance before shooting them, as I was only trying to illustrate the keystone concept, and the color was not important.

To illustrate white balance, I shot a family heirloom ring on a white background:

Heirloom ring on white background, Auto white balance.

The color of the incandescent bulbs makes the white background and everything else look yellow.  Then I set a custom white balance for my setup, and shot the ring again with no other changes:

Heirloom ring, custom white balance.

It really makes a difference and saves tons of post-processing of your images.  You could correct most of the color balance out with Photoshop, but setting the white balance up front saves all of that time and effort for everything you shoot. Also note that the ring is not entirely in focus.  I was shooting at a low f/stop number which results in shallow depth of field.  Normally this isn't an issue as you're shooting flat objects like albums, but a three dimensional object can cause problems.  I also shot the ring on a black background:

Heirloom ring on black background.

You can experiment with different backgrounds and lights to see what works best for the item you're digitizing.  You'll note that a black cloth background tends to attract and show lint and dust.  Have a vacuum handy!

This ring belonged to Sally Lommel, the same person who put together the scrapbook in Part I.  She was my wife's great-aunt.  The ring was an engagement ring from the one time Sally was proposed to; the marriage never happened, but Sally ended up keeping the ring.  This is an example of digitizing a three-dimensional object.  You might get away with this ring in a scanner as it's relatively flat, but anything with more depth would be hard to get on a scanner.  Also, on a scanner, you can't position objects other than flat on the platen glass.  With a camera, I could have devised a stand to set the ring upright for some different views.  I may yet do this at some point.  A ring box would be a good choice for that, if I could locate one of neutral color.

I've covered the basics of using your digital camera to digitize  things you can't get in your scanner.  If you have any questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them in the comments below.  I'm also planning to be on the next Scanfest this weekend, you might try catching me then.  If you have a specific item you'd like advice on digitizing, I'll do my best to tell you how I'd tackle it with the equipment you specify.

Missed Part I?  You can still read it here.

Tech Tuesday – Have you stumbled upon a piece of technology or new Web-based application that would be of interest to your fellow genealogy colleagues? Post at your blog on Tech Tuesday and show us the ins and outs of this technology and how it can benefit the genealogy community.  This is a new series suggested by Donna Peterson of Hanging with Donna and in the past there have been many iterations of this series: the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) blog Narations as well as The Family Curator by Denise Levenick.  (Blurb shamelessly stolen from Thomas McEntee at Geneabloggers!)

Tech Tuesday - Delayed!

I know I promised that I would do a follow-up to last week's Digitizing with Cameras article, but I am finally getting caught up from my weekend.  I participated in a 50-hour Trivia contest the local college radio station runs each year.  Between sleep deprivation and trying to catch up with everything, I ran out of time today to get the new post done.  I will try to post tomorrow, Thursday at the latest.

If you have any questions from the last segment, please send them in ASAP so I can try to answer them.

Sunday Obituary - Edmund "Shorty" Lommel

St. Cloud Daily Times, 23 Oct 1979

Lommel

  Edmund C. "Shorty" Lommel, 75, 312-14th Ave. N, died Tuesday at St. Cloud Hospital.

  Funeral services will be 10:30 a.m. Thursday at St. John Cantius Catholic Church with the Rev. Lawrence Torborg officiating. Burial will be in Assumption Cemetery.

  Friends may call after 3 today at Daniel Funeral Home. Loyal Order of the Moose will meet at 7 tonight at the funeral home followed by parish prayers at 8.

  Mr. Lommel was born Jan. 12, 1904, in Albany to the late Joseph and Anna (Friedrich) Lommel. He married Mildred Willenbring July 24, 1928, in St. Mary's Cathedral. He was employed as an automobile mechanic 47 years by Tenvoorde Motor Company and later by Bernick Bottling Company. Following his retirement in 1966, he was employed part-time by St. Cloud Park Department. He was a member of St. John Cantius Parish and Loyal Order of the Moose.

  Survivors include his wife; sons and daughters, Robert and Donald, St. Cloud; Lois D'Luhy, Kensington, Md.; Mrs. Stephen (Sharon) Kettells, Richmond, Va.; sisters and brothers, Sally, St. Cloud; Gilbert, South Haven; Mrs. August (Gertrude) Meyer, St. Paul; Mrs. Ray (Johanna) Weismann, Minneapolis; Mrs. Ray (Rose) Uberecken, Denver, Colo.; Mrs. Herschel (Anna May) Kiebert, Meridan, Idaho; Dr. Jerome Lommell, Madesto [sic], Calif., and 11 grandchildren.

  He was preceded in death by seven brothers and sisters.

  Pallbearers will be Conrad Kloskin, Victor and Virgil Hengel, LeRoy May, Tom Lommel and Don Schwegmann.

Edmund C. "Shorty" Lommel's obituary is included in the scrapbook I received in a recent Treasure Chest Thursday.  Edmund was my wife's grandmother's brother, and an older brother to the creator of the scrapbook in question.   This is a very good obituary!  It contains birth and marriage dates, spouse's maiden name, residence and occupational information for the deceased.  It also gives first and last names of survivors, including female spouses.  Also included are church and fraternal organization memberships.  Very informative compared to many I have seen.

I have now done the initial digitization of the entire scrapbook using my digital camera as I discussed in Part I of my Tech Tuesday article on Digitizing With Cameras.  I used the technique I discussed of cleaning up the image to get the best possible image for use in my OCR software.  The resulting text you see above came out of the software error free. At that low error rate of a few or no errors per conversion, it's well worth the time spent cleaning up the image to avoid transcribing it all manually.


 
Sunday’s Obituary – if you have obituaries of family members and ancestors, consider posting them along with other information about that person as part of Sunday’s Obituary. This is an ongoing series developed by Leslie Ann at Ancestors Live Here.

Tech Tuesday - Digitizing With Cameras, Part I

Digital cameras now come in several forms.  There are a plethora of what are called point & shoot models, cameras that are good basic units that don't require much knowledge of photography or gadgetry.  Simply point them at what you wish to photograph, and press the button to take the picture.  The camera does the heavy lifting of figuring out how to make the picture good.  The other major type is Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR).  These are a digital version of the 35mm film cameras, and require more knowledge of photography, both theory and camera operation.  Most of these also have automatic modes like the point & shoots, but they do best when you understand how to get the most out of them for the images you want.  The single biggest benefit brought by digital photography is cost; you can shoot a nearly endless stream of digital images for virtually no money, where old film-based photography cost for every frame.

A week or so ago I wrote about scanners, how they work and some ideas about how to use them best for genealogy.  During the last Scanfest there was some Q&A about how to scan things that don't fit in your scanner  This includes oversized materials as well as three dimensional objects.  The simple answer is to use a digital camera!  The quality of digital camera images has increased very rapidly over the last decade, and current and recent models are more than capable of capturing very useful images.

Some of the items I need to scan are unfortunately glued into old scrapbooks and photo albums.  This means I will need to use my camera to digitize those items, while not damaging them by attempting to remove them from their mountings.  You'll want to get some distance and use a slight telephoto setting (or lens) as using a wide angle lens up close causes visual distortion, making straight lines appear curvy.  You'll also want plenty of light!  Your camera's flash may work well enough, try a number of setting variations to see if you can get usable results.  If not, you will need some kind of auxiliary lighting.  This can be done on the cheap.  Look at your local DIY superstore for clamp on reflector light fixtures and some 75-100 watt incandescent or 13-20 watt CFL bulbs.  A couple of these should be sufficient.  You need to place them at about a 45 degree angle above and to the left and right of what you're shooting to avoid glare and reflections, especially on glossy photos or plastic-covered album pages.  Be aware that if you're using this method, you will need to set your camera's White Balance to Tungsten so it can compensate for the yellowish color of the light.  Another option if you're shooting printed material like newspaper clippings is to set your camera to monochrome mode, which makes the resulting images black & white.

Here's an example I took:
 

Normal color shot with flash

Camera set to Monochrome

I should note at this point that the same issues with image type that we discussed in the Scanner Technology article hold true here!  If your camera only exports JPG images, you should immediately convert those to TIFF before doing anything else.  This will keep them from getting degraded when you edit, and you will be editing these.  Looking at my samples, you can see there are several obituaries on this page.  I will use the smallest one on the right as an example.  Using my favorite image editor (I use Adobe Photoshop Elements, you can use whatever you are comfortable with) I straightened and cropped the image down to just the little obit I want to work on.  Here's the result:

Betty Steuart obituary, monochrome

Not bad.  However, I've already saved it once when I shot it, and now a second time when I cropped it.  You can already see some issues with image quality.  I did this one as a JPG as an example.  (When I shoot for archival purposes, I will shoot in my camera's native RAW format.  You should use RAW if you can, or convert to TIFF immediately if not, then convert and save as other formats as needed for other uses.)   I would like to use some Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to transcribe this article to text so I can insert the text into my genealogy software.  OCR software works best with very clean type of high contrast.  This example is pretty low contrast, so I can use my image editing software to adjust that and boost the contrast.  Here's the result:

Betty Steuart obituary, contrast enhanced

This is much better!  Any stray markings can be interpreted by OCR software as additional letters or punctuation, so we want to eliminate as much as we can up front.  Here's the output from my OCR software from this cleaned up example:

MRS. BETTY STEAURT
WALNUT CREEK, Calif.
Mrs. Betty Lommel Steaurt of
here died. She is survived by a
daughter, Mrs. James (Rita)
Stoll; three grandchildren and
brothers and sisters, Mrs.
Hirsch (Ann) Kiebert,
dian, Idaho; Jerome, Modesto,
Calif.; Mrs. August (Gertrude)
Meyer, St. Paul; Mrs. Ray
(Johanna) Weismann, Min-
neapolis; Gilbert, Pearl Lake;
Mrs. Ray (Rose) Ubereeken,
Denver, Colo. Edmund and
Sally, St. Cloud.

There's just one error in this transcription, a common one where a 'c' has been rendered as an 'e' in Uberecken near the end.  That's a very good result for OCR software! 

I've covered a lot of material, and this should be enough to let you try it yourself.  If you have some album-bound material you need to digitize that won't fit in the scanner, try using your camera and see what kind of results you get.  Try a bunch of different settings to see what works best.  Next time I'll cover digitizing photographs and 3-D objects using a camera instead of a scanner.

Tech Tuesday – Have you stumbled upon a piece of technology or new Web-based application that would be of interest to your fellow genealogy colleagues? Post at your blog on Tech Tuesday and show us the ins and outs of this technology and how it can benefit the genealogy community.  This is a new series suggested by Donna Peterson of Hanging with Donna and in the past there have been many iterations of this series: the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) blog Narations as well as The Family Curator by Denise Levenick.  (Blurb shamelessly stolen from Thomas McEntee at Geneabloggers!)