falter
Veteran Member
I've been googling this and I keep getting histories that reach back before the 1960s featuring commercial products. I'm trying to find the first scanner(s) promoted for personal/home use. Anyone got any ideas on this?
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What was the first computer scanner marketed for personal use?
- Thread starter falter
- Start date
krebizfan
Veteran Member
Logitech ScanMan of the late 80s is the earliest heavily advertised home scanner I can think of. General purpose not limited to bar codes.
The barcode wand for the HP-41 could be credited with personal use. The documentation suggests an introduction in 1981. That would be before the other commercial scanner companies like Cauzin made their foray into the home market with specialty limited scanners.
The barcode wand for the HP-41 could be credited with personal use. The documentation suggests an introduction in 1981. That would be before the other commercial scanner companies like Cauzin made their foray into the home market with specialty limited scanners.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Got the original monochrome ScanMan and ISA card and software, if anyone wants it. Took some practice to use.
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
Behold the ThunderScan, a dingus that swapped in place of the ink cartridge in an Apple ImageWriter printer and turned it into a veeeery sloooow sheet feed scanner. This came out in late 1984, which I’m pretty sure beats the ScanMan by three years or so. This is the first “personal” scanner I can think of. Drum and flatbed scanners definitely existed in the 1980’s, but they weren’t something you could have at home.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
I owned a send-only flatbed fax device in the 80s. Odd thing was that the PCB had pads for the scanner output, but were unpopulated. I suppose that fax machines in general would qualify as scanners and thus predate the PC.
falter
Veteran Member
I had one of those when I was young as my first scanner. That plus VGA got me my first experiences with digital photo editing. Getting pieces of wide photos stitched together correctly could sometimes be tricky.
After that I think I had this really wide scanman thing that you could lift up and run like a scanman or install in a base and feed sheets through. Forget what it was called.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
I have a handheld scanner for the apple iie (forget the brand). Its just so absurd Ihad to buy it.I think its from around 1986. Id have to check.
HoJoPo
Veteran Member
Is it the Quickie by Vitesse? I used one in high school (1989 to 1991) on an Apple IIgs with Publish It! to add black and white photos for the photocopied school newspaper.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
Yeah thats it!! Im sure it works on the iigs but i have a program disk for the iie 128k (and yes i used it its ridiculous but works).
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
The pictures of the box and other evidence suggests it’s from closer to 1990. There were a *ton* of companies repackaging generic hand scanners like that for various computers around that time; I had a… Mustek? ScanMan clone that was very similar for the family 286.
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
It looks like the first consumer PC FAX card came out around 1985, so faxing something to your PC to “scan” it was a thing you could do before full page scanners got cheap (of course FAX machines themselves were pretty expensive, so presumably you’d be using the one at the office). The quality was pretty bad, of course.
I’m pretty sure that the first what we’d consider today “normal” flatbed SCSI scanners were available by the latest 1980’s, but I don’t know off the top of my head what the “first” one was. They were a dime a dozen by the early 1990’s. Well, no, not a dime, the first ones were a few thousand dollars. Prices had fallen enough by the late 1990’s I think I “only” paid about $400(?) for a 300 DPI color legal-size Microtek ScanMaker?
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
… what’s kind of sad today is if you have steady hands you can “scan” a letter-size whazit by taking a picture of it with a cell phone and get similar effective resolution as a late 90’s flatbed.
Al Kossow
Documentation Wizard
DEST PC Scan , ca 1987. It was one of the first non-toy ie. "thunderscan" scanners with software for the Mac.
Sheet feed letter size monochrome probably based on a fax ccd scanner.
There were flatbeds before that, like the Datacopy, which was a spinout from Xerox, but they were expensive.
DEST - Scanner | 102631317 | Computer History Museum
DEST promotional materials and design scetches | 102727287 | Computer History Museum
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falter
Veteran Member
I finally got my hands on one of these the other day. Our school lab got one when they refurbished the lab in 1988 or so. No idea what time frame these were out though. Not even sure why it was there. I remember trying to scan some photos and the resolution was awful. I read online these can do 300dpi but the one at my school had this horrible 'bayesian dithering' that made every photo looked like it was enlarged from a newspaper.
Attachments
Al Kossow
Documentation Wizard
you can find a review of all of the scanners available in 1987 here
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
It’s a bit breathtaking that the one full-color flatbed in the roundup was $6,700, not counting the Targa graphics card necessary to use the provided software. The cheapest flatbed in the roundup, weirdly, seems to have been an IBM device. Second was an HP for $1,495; I didn’t realize HP’s scanner line went back quite that far!
Also interesting: in the “cheap” category was a ThunderScan-like device for Epson printers *by* Epson. Only fit three models of printer; if they’d come up with something that fit the MX/FX-80 and friends that would probably be a lot more memorable.
Most of these early scanners were useless for continuous tone photographs. About the best you could hope for if you wanted a semi-acceptable grayscale scan would be to run the raw scan at the highest resolution you could and then fiddle with blurring and scaling down the image. With luck you could get something that looked “okay” onscreen. Limited RAM and CPU performance was kind of a killer, though. In short, unless you had a ton of money this all sucked until the 1990’s.
cjs
Experienced Member
This is really where it ends up, isn't it?
Looking back, I just realised that this 1980 S-100 bus image capture system is, from a hardware point of view, pretty much exactly the same as my current book scanner: a camera and a frame buffer. Only mine has about two million times as much memory for the frame buffer (and of course the hardware to which the image is transferred for processing has many, many times more than that).
This is, of course, comparing my modern system to the base 32 KB CAT-100/A, at $1895 ($7200 today). You could come somewhat closer to modern capabilities with the 6-board CAT-800/A system, with a massive 256 KB of memory, for $7850 (~$30,000 today).
falter
Veteran Member
I got one of those and the 256 color one I think. There was a third-party software package you could buy called Halo Desktop Imager that would stitch together your scans.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
It's pretty surprising how long some of the flatbed scanners hang on. I have one of those UMAX Astra 1200S units from the late 90s. I was surprised that folks were still using them 20+ years later. It's not my usual one--I use an old HP ScanJet for most things.
The mono ScanMan was a bit of a disappointment. I could never get my scans straight or steady enough to do a convincing job of stitching. The other issue is that it uses red LEDs as the source, so even color-monochrome mapping is way off. So here it sits, basically unused.
Now, of course, many low-end laser copiers will functions as printers and scanners.
The mono ScanMan was a bit of a disappointment. I could never get my scans straight or steady enough to do a convincing job of stitching. The other issue is that it uses red LEDs as the source, so even color-monochrome mapping is way off. So here it sits, basically unused.
Now, of course, many low-end laser copiers will functions as printers and scanners.