Plustek lists the following as some of the D28's core features:- Compact design & easy to carry
- Fast Scanning Speed ( 2.2 sec per page)
- Special design for Embossed / Plastic card scanning
- Duplex / Simplex Full Color Scanning
- Power & Time saving (no warming lead time needed)
- Multi function with user friendly software
- Support Asian Language Recognition (Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese)
The user interface on the scanner is dead simple. It has a numeric LED that displays which of 9 user-settable scanning modes it's in, a button to change the mode, and then two buttons to select Simplex (single-sided) or Duplex (double-sided) scanning. That's it. Oh, and a power button on the side. The top cover flips open to clear jams and the back part slides up and down to let the user select where outgoing media go (either straight out the back or diverted straight up for easier retrieval). The only other user-accessible moving part are the sliding media guides on the front, which vary from 8-1/2" to business card width.Setup includes plugging in the removable cord (with power adapter), plugging in the USB cord to your PC and the scanner, running the setup software, and feeding in the special calibration sheet included in the box. All told, it took me less than 10 minutes, with most of that unpacking and letting the software install.
Plustek includes a raft of software titles with the scanner: "ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Sprint for OCR and NewSoft MaxReader 4.1 for organizing Asia language, and NewSoft Presto! PageManager 7.10 for document management, NewSoft Presto! Image Folio 4.5 for photo management." Pretty complete, but obviously, Plustek used all of its HR budget to hire engineers instead of English-language web editors.
The one piece of software that the user will interact with most often is the DigiDoc scan control interface. This is where all the settings for each of the 9 user-determined scanning modes. Each mode can be individually configured along a variety of settings, including output type (e.g., image file, PDF, etc.), resolution, color depth, save-to directory, file autonaming scheme, and so on. It is impressively flexible and fairly straightforward, if rather bland and uninviting.
Here are a couple of sample screen shots. The first one is set up to save modest-resolution, grayscale JPGs. The 9 tabs each correspond to a different profile, and the checkmarks indicate whether or not the scanner should make them available via its mode selection button.


I tested the D28 out on a few different jobs. One was a stack of business cards I'd been collecting. I was able to churn through all 150 in about 12 minutes, and that was mostly determined by how fast I could stick the next card into the scanner each time. Output was just fine, although auto-deskew didn't straighten out some of my more misaligned feeds. I configured DigiDoc to save each scan straight to a PNG file (a nice touch) and then mass-uploaded them to Evernote where they're now all searchable online.I also scanned in a couple of my daughter's drawings on the D28's max resolution (600 dpi) and they looked very good. This isn't the right machine for scanning in photo negatives or slides, but printed materials up to about the thickness of a CD work great. I tried sending a piece of paper with an 1/8th-inch thick sticker on it and it got caught up every time, so it's not nearly as flexible as a flatbed scanner, but then those aren't usually very portable, either.
All told, I'd definitely consider the D28 a strong contender if I regularly had small scanning jobs, moved locations fairly often, and wasn't trying to scan books or other non-feedable materials. The flexibility of DigiDoc plus the simplicity of the D28's interface make it really simple to set up and use right away. While I have no idea about the D28's build quality (many scanners, even expensive units, suffer feed problems even after a few hundred pages), at this price, you won't feel too bad replacing it if it stops performing up to snuff.

In July, 2002, Fujifilm and Olympus horrified digital photography fans by launching an all-new flash memory format, the xD-Picture Card. Why, nobody outside these two companies was sure, but it seems the grand experiment may be coming to an end.
I am in need of two new pieces of gear and would like YOUR suggestions and insights on what to get.
Second, I need a smallish digital camera with a reasonable resolution (5MP+), but with as much optical zoom as possible (320mm and greater would be ideal). This is for use with the 










A few months ago, 


I've been cleaning out some old stuff of mine and my parents and have come across an interesting collection of stuff from my childhood. Two things I had saved for future reference included a 1975 World Series (baseball) program and a 1981 newspaper about the Space Shuttle. Looking through these, I discovered a veritable time capsule of consumer electronics -- advertisements from brands like Tandy, Zenith, Polaroid, and Magnavox are pretty amusing compared to today's offerings.
It's time we said good-bye to the "D" in "DSLR". DSLR, short for Digital Single-Lens Reflex, refers to the fact that these upper-end cameras no longer rely on film.
From the "who wudda thunk" department comes this CNET story: 



Browsing the circulars in the newspaper this morning, I noticed what seems like a pretty decent deal.

Since I began my search to replace my aging Olympus C-2100 UZ (I still miss my Uzi sometimes), I've yet to find a digital camera that I'd say is close to my ideal. Even if price weren't an issue, every model offered up in the past 2 years is lacking something important to me.
5) A fast fixed lens with high-quality optics. This isn't so much a requirement as a logical conclusion. I want image stabilization in the lens, but I don't really want to have to buy a bunch of really expensive OIS lenses. Plus, I don't prefer the idea of hauling around a bunch of lenses -- I used to own a 35mm SLR and having a camera bag the size of a hockey duffle always irritated me. Today's long-zoom prosumer digicams have great range -- 35-350mm (10X) is common and 35-420mm (12X) is becoming moreso. That's a lot of zoom, my friend, and except for maybe slapping on a wide-angle adapter once in a while, 35-420mm covers pretty much anything I can imagine doing on any kind of regular basis. So I'm happy to give up the ability to swap lenses if they'd give me a really good (fast with great optics) fixed lens.

































Talk about serendipity! GearBits ran an 

I'm sensing that digital photography is slowly splitting into two groups with very different needs and equipment.



According to 




Nikon has just announced the successor to its successful D1H digital camera. The D2H (talk about originality in naming) is a logical successor to the D1H, and it features 4.1 Effective Megapixel CCD -- Nikon original JFET imaging sensor LBCAST for high-resolution images (2,464 x 1,632 pixels). This is the new sensor recently developed and announced by Nikon. 




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