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hand-held scanner...rare item...

F

Four-Phase

Member
Joined
Jul 8, 2012
Messages
14
Location
Hatyai, Thailand
Hi everyone.I have an old hand scanner.working of course!!! Giving it away. It is still "in box" condition.
can only be used in old XT or AT model.it uses an ISA bus interface. Please check that your motherboard has it. i will upload pictures soon.
it yours free. just "collect DHL" and i will sent it to you.. TQ
 
I still have the first ScanMan (monochrome). I remember how disappointed I was with it. To scan a page, you'd have to make several passes and then try to "stitch" them together. I eventually found a flatbed FAX machine with a computer interface. Much better.
 
I think they are kind of cool to have, I kept my scanman greyscale and color plus those ISA cards. Mostly I just use SCSI or USB scanners that people toss or my Lexmark AIO scanner, copier, printer.
 
I have two of these things. One is a third party with an ISA card and the other is a grayscale ScanMan with the parallel port adapter. Neither of them work.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I still have the first ScanMan (monochrome). I remember how disappointed I was with it. To scan a page, you'd have to make several passes and then try to "stitch" them together. I eventually found a flatbed FAX machine with a computer interface. Much better.
Click to expand...

I worked at Egghead in the early 1990s and we sold a "track" for handheld scanners that did two things: It kept the scanner from drifting horizontally as you dragged it down, and it came with three colored gels (red, green, blue obviously) and you can guess what those were used for. I remember being mildly impressed at the time, although it was a lot of work to go through to get a color scan of something.

What I loved my handheld scanner for at the time was bypassing copy protection. The scan beam was red, which "saw" right through those black-font-printed-on-brown-paper code sheets included with games at the time.
 
OT but the first example I saw of that was my first (and incorrect (hey I was a kid and didn't see the fine print)) purchase of Wizardry. It was a great bargain. apparently it wasn't for PC.. but the manual I remember had black lettering on dark red paper. I suppose anything works but yeah I couldn't xerox it for a friend who had the game but had lost his manual. Never did try scanning it. I had (well I never throw crap out so still have) a similar hand scanner. I think it was color though.. it was overly expensive and new at the time. A friend traded a bunch of stuff for it, then later I traded a zip drive and something for it as well.
 
Yes, I too still have, on a remote shelf, a parallel-port version, colour, with 5v power from a piggyback PS/2 connector.

I soon found it too much trouble. It's just too hard to keep the roller straight on track and moving at a regular speed, especially on jobs like open books with uneven surfaces.

I wonder if anyone has POSITIVE memories of these hand-helds? They seemed to promise so much.

It might be time for a Designers' Hall of Infamy for turkeys like this that survive only as odd collectors' items. I would add the folding keyboard I bought for an early Palm Pilot. It worked, but the dim little Palm screen was such a pain to read that I soon abandoned it for anything but organiser function.

Rick
 
They were cheap and you didn't need an SCSI card to use one. I purchased a program called Halo Desktop Imager that did stitching decently and allowed multi sheet banner making (wish I still had my original disks, never seen it in warez either).
 
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