Posted in Press Releases, Product Announcements on November 8th, 2010

Colortrac, an important innovator in the field of wide format scanning technology, has achieved a breakthrough in improving the scanning workflow of large format documents with the launch of the SmartWorks Pro software family. These new Touch Screen enabled products are designed to utilise all the features of the SmartLF scanner family in a way that improves the scanning performance and assures great color images, straight out of the box.

Introducing the new software, Sales and Marketing Director – Peter de Winter Brown commented that “the SmartWorks Pro software family is an optional software package that is fully featured for the professional user. The combination of Touch Screen capability and superior functionality helps our customers make great quality images at the ‘Touch of a Button'”.

The optional SmartWorks Pro package is available in three separate versions allowing customers to choose the relevant components and pricing suitable for their main business – the variants are:

Retail List
Price (US $)
Scan (scan only)    $ 650
Copier (copy only)    $ 650
Scan & Copy (scan to file and copy simultaneously)      $ 1,200
By packaging the relevant features in these three configurations, we have optimised the workflow to suit our customers’ typical applications and documents being scanned. All these products benefit from the Scan-once technology allowing adjustments to the scanned image to be done on screen prior to filing or printing, without the need for re-scanning the documents many times. This clearly saves you time, but there are yet more ways in which you can make your SmartLF scanner even more productive.

Having difficulty in scanning poor quality originals then let SmartWorks Pro take the problem away. Historically, the normal method of creating a cleaned image from a document with a poor image is to change the threshold level between light and dark areas and this has required multiple scans to achieve the corrected and balanced image. Using the Scan Once and the 2D Intelligent Adaptive Thresholding (IAT) features in SmartWorks Pro, a more advanced thresholding algorithm is used whilst scanning to separate black from white and is continually altered in response to the background darkness. If you want to alter the threshold level, this can be done without re-scanning by using the Touch Screen to adjust the threshold slider and monitor its effects on the screen instantly. Either way, it allows you to produce crystal clear copies of badly stained documents or even old Blueprints in one scan.

Consider that large archival job with different sized and poor quality documents. Using the 10 Preset Filters that reflect typical elements of many types of scanned documents, we have allowed the unskilled user to get excellent scanned image quality at the touch of a button. If the documents are also differing sizes this is not a problem, the Auto Size feature automatically sets the parameters of the scan to suit the size of the original document. By using the Auto Detect Document as well, then the scan starts automatically as it detects the leading edge of the document allowing the operator to concentrate on the staging and preparation of subsequent documents for feeding. If you add in the Auto Name filing features; you can automatically index the file names for a given job and also provide an Automatic Time Stamp so it gives you an immediate audit trail on your PC to track everything scanned. These simple but effective workflow improvements not only allow you greater flexibility in defining the final quality of the image, but it saves valuable time in doing it!

Furthermore, by using standard Windows™ printer drivers, you can couple the scanner to any compatible large format printer to provide excellent copy quality. This also gives you greater control over the output copy size by printing only what you need which helps in reducing media wastage. If the Windows printer driver is not providing the correct output quality for your specific media, then the integrated ICC colour management in SmartWorks Pro viewer combined with the Media Profiler facility can help you create outputs specifically suited to your chosen media and printer.

Let SmartWorks Pro help you make that quantum jump by resetting the levels of image quality available to your customers at the “Touch of a Button”.

For existing Colortrac customers, discounts are available for upgrades to SmartWorks Pro from existing ScanWorks or CopySmart software packages.