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Printers, Copiers & Scanners

Printers

There are several B&W laser printers located throughout the building for faculty, staff and student use. At NCSU printing is a students responsibility however, in this department graduate students have access to a grad student laser printer and senior design students have a printer located in senior design room. Any Bio&Ag student may request printing when it involves administrative paperwork see a department secretary or a student assistant.
The department also has a large formats printer for poster printing as requested by a faculty member see the Poster page about this printer.

• Secretary Office - Room 189 Weaver Lab Building
• Student Assistant Office - Room 110 Weaver Admin. Building
• Bio&Ag Graphics Room - Room 207 Weaver Admin. Building
• CALS Copy Service - Ag. Communication Building
• University Graphics Student - thesis printing

Copiers

The department has copiers located in the Administration and Lab buildings. The copiers are university owned and require the purchase of a copy card to operate. See the secretaries about obtaining a copy card or view the university Wolfcopy copy center web site. Learn about the Library Copy Service.

Scanners

Location

• Secretary Office - Room 189 Weaver Lab Building
• Student Assistant Office - Room 110 Weaver Admin. Building
• BAE Graphics Room - Room 207 Weaver Admin. Building

Scanning Basics

What is a scanner? A scanner is an image capturing device that can be attached to your computer today via USB connection. There are a number of different kinds of scanners:

• Flat Bed (most common pictured in headline)
• Hand held (generally used to scan small flat items very portable)
• Slide scanners (scans slides and negatives-recapturing images)
• Drum scanner (very expensive used mostly by industry/publishers)

Flat Beds are by far the most common scanner in use. These scanners come with scanning software you install on your machine to acquire and image. Depending on the scanner manufacturer each scanner comes with its own scanning software program. Like all software packages some are better than others. Additionally, scanning software can operate independently or it can interface with other programs on your computer so you can acquire directly into popular image editing programs like Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, Photo Paint etc. With some scanning software you can only make basic image decisions but, in image editing programs like Photoshop, Fireworks etc. you can make major changes to acquired images.

What can be scanned?

When you scan you are making a picture image of whatever is placed on the window of the scanners' surface. These days you can scan just about anything. Some of the common things scanned using a flat bed scanner are: photos, drawings, other printed materials, maps, charts, slides (some of the newest scanners come with a slide scan device)

In what formats can I save my acquired image?

Images can be saved for the web as gif, jpg, and png files and for print as tiff, bmp, DFX(auto cad) and many more file formats which are used often by graphic professionals.

tiff ---I looks look generally good everywhere (except the web). A tiff file will open up in most programs, A good quality tiff file will have a very large file sizes lots of bites. The size is big because the most amount of digital information is scanned and saved (stored) with a tiff file. Since, tiffs are information heavy files you could consider them the mother of all picture formats. A tiff can be converted into any other picture format but not so in the reverse, example: You can change a tiff file to a jpg file and you get great quality however, you can't change a jpg file to a tiff file without most of the picture information lost.

Tiffs are ideal for 4 color press reproduction and slide transparencies. They are in CYMK color mode for press production reasons. When quality counts a tiff file is the best choice. Note: you will lose clarity if you enlarge a tiff file greater than its original scanned in size. Tiff files can also be saved as eps files (a Vector graphic format) these are often used in graphic production since you can enlarge and re-size it on the page and keep the quality. (EPS = Encapsulated Post Script). An EPS is a file format used to transfer a graphic image between applications and platforms. EPS files contain PostScript code in ASCII text.)

bmp ----they are like a tif file only contain a little less graphic information. This is a good choice for Word documents and white papers.

jpg ---are good for photographs or artwork that includes shading or blending and are used often for the web, for on-screen slide shows and for slide presentations. If used on the web they should be sized to a small file size. NOTE: if you resize a jpg file too often it will loose quality with each recompression and degrade the original quality of the photo. JPG files are saved in RGB mode. NOTE: Recent Improvements to digital camera resolutions has also improved the versatility of the jpg file format. With new camera resolutions jpg files can be saved in small, medium and large file formats and converted to CYMK color for print use. However, the more you resave a jpg file the more it looses its quality.

png ---is a popular format for the web and designers like working with these files in Microsoft Fireworks and Dreamweaver. A nice feature of png file is making a alpha transparency. Png files are nice because it creates a working Firework file much like a Photoshops PDS.

gif ---files are your smallest file size that reproduce well on screen, Use a gif file for web line art work charts, clip art and greyscale photos. Gif files are index mode files which are a small file size. Don't try to use a gif file bigger than what it was originally scanned in at because it will be of very poor quality.

What is Greyscale? - This means the color has been removed from the photo or drawing and only the gray values are left. Any photo or art can be made into a grayscale image by changing it to grayscale mode.

How do you use a flat bed scanner?

1. Place an image of the item you want on the window of the scanner keep items straight, use the window edges to line things up against. How you place it on the window is how you get it.
2. Open the scanning software. A basic scan software dialog box looks like this:
3. Go to menu file/acquire the scanner will start to light up and scan over your image then, the image will appear in the small window area of the scan dialog box it may be unclear and not look like the quality of the final scan.
4. Choose what it is you are scanning the most common choices are:
5. Line art--- B&W (with no shades of gray)
   B&W photo ---(anything in B&W with shades of gray in it, this could be a photo or drawing (art with gray areas)
   Millions of colors ---(anything with color in it photo or drawing) Then with the cursor draw a rectangle around exactly what on the page you want to scan (you can scan a portion of the picture or the entire picture).
6. The path should be established once during instillation and not need to be changed each use just leave this alone.
7. Adjust the brightness and contrast with the sliding scale or better yet there are often options to automatically adjust the image. Note in the scanner interface above the yin/yang button between the brightness and contrast will adjust it.
8. Optional: you can adjust the size of the picture to make the file smaller but, remember when you make it smaller you loose flexibility in scaling the image in the future. This means that when you go to place the picture in a document and you want it to be bigger than the size you had originally scan it in at - you will then loose quality. The best quality picture is scanned full size and will be use on your page half as small. For the most part if you don't need to save (size) bites leave this alone.
9. Finally go to menu file/save and save the image choosing a format you need. If you are not sure what format will be needed in the future make it a tiff file. From a tiff file you can use any imaging software and create any other format you will need without compromising the quality of the picture. This is not so for other file format.

Slide Scanning

If you have a lot of slides it is best to use a photo service and get your slides scanned using a batch slide scanner. A batch slide scanners can scan 50 or so slides at a time. If you have fewer than 50 slides the Bio&Ag graphics room has slide scanners for use.

OCR Scanning?

It is a way to capture typed printed copy and turn it back into editable copy. Adobe Acrobat (not Acrobat Reader) has done a nice job of including the ability to export scanned text. Be sure to check the option for OCR text recognition or you will get only a photo image of your document. You will need to open Acrobat and choose the scanning option (create PDF from scanner) choose OCR recognition and it exports copy to text. When you OCR scan you are saving the text in ASCII raw format. Notepad a software on every computer opens ASCII plain text. Plain text is useful because it is stripped of formatting and can be pasted into any text editing program ( MS Word, Pagemaker, Quark, PowerPoint, web pages etc.). You can create editable text from any paper copy of clear typewriter text, computer text, book text, brochure text, etc. It saves on retyping time in many cases. If the copy is in bad condition (page blotches, broken lettering, faint lettering) OCR may not help because sometimes you spend more time fixing the OCR text corrections and retyping may be faster.

Blueprint Scanning

Scanning for the purpose of having an electronic copy of a blueprint can be done but not in-house. Try using local rapid-repro print vendor like Kinkos for this service. A local suggestion would be Duncan-Parnell (see service providers page) they have pick-up and delivery service. These services can also make large duplicates of blueprints as well.

Note: Page links are provided as a starting point for information on the subject but are in no way an endorsement of the sites or accuracy of information they present.