Why Does Helping My Daughter Take an Imaging Expert?

My daughter, an aspiring journalist currently interning for New York Magazine, called us in a panic. She needed to resubmit her resume for next summer, and her clippings were needed. But we were in Boston and she was in New York – and she needed it right away.

What’s a father to do? I had been hoping to go for a run before work that morning – it was surprisingly warm – but this had precedence. My wife got out the clippings (I had kind of hoped everything was available online) and I could see it wasn’t going to be easy.

The clippings were pasted two sided on cardboard and they had color elements. They were also larger than 8.5x11. And I knew that they couldn’t just be legible, they had to look pretty good, but they had to be sized appropriately for email.

I took a first stab with my standard scanning software on my Epson flatbed scanner. File size for one page – 22 MB! That wasn’t going to do it. I decided to try a PNG conversion and realized why it had never really gotten popular – the text didn’t look good. Finally I resorted to the tried and true JPEG. First file size was only 200 KB but it didn’t look good. So I went back and forth on JPEG compression values until each page was readable and looked pretty good – around 1 MB each. Ok, those I could email. Success! And only about 30 minutes – fortunately because I was familiar with the trade-offs.

So what did I learn? Well, most people wouldn’t have checked the initial image size and would only find out it was too big when the email bounced. Others would have gone for a smaller file size and learned too late it printed poorly. So success requires knowledge, speed and adaptability. Sort of Snowbound’s motto…

And if you think this isn’t applicable to business, I disagree. The intricacies of handling the multitude of imaging requirements out there in an efficient manner is not trivial and it is quite hard if you don’t understand the issues. It is not uncommon for customers to take a multipage mixed color/black and white document, run it through the scanner and only realize after a while that their repository is getting full way too quickly and processing these documents is taking minutes instead of seconds. Persondays might be wasted before it’s realized that mixed color documents can very quickly put your process in jeopardy if you don’t distinguish between them and black and white documents.

So, as above – success requires knowledge, speed and adaptability.