Choosing a COLORTRAC Document Scanner

Colortrac have been building innovative large format scanners since 1989.
The next paragraphs contain our technical sales pitch with information about key innovations within Colortrac wide format scanners.
We are very happy to discuss and guide your purchasing decisions.

The current models all use LED lighting to provide rugged, long life, instant on white light while also minimising power consumption.

The SmartLF SGi series employ CCD (Charge Coupled Device) RGB colour sensors which feature the widest colour gamut and tonal rendition. CCD cameras also have a small focal range which means uneven and lightly embossed surfaces can be successfully scanned. The SmartLF SGi has six CCDs across the scan width to minimize geometric distortion, more than any other similarly sized scanner. Colortrac CCD cameras are compact leading to a compact scanner. Each CCD Camera is precisely aligned to ensure all the pixels are in a straight line. To maintain this precision stitching requires some strong construction and hence CCD camera scanners are relatively heavy, less portable.

The SmartLF SCi and SmartLF Scan! Series employ CIS (Contact Image Sensors) which are nowadays a single strip sensor and this inherently results in every scan pixel being correctly aligned at all times. Colortrac CIS sensors exhibit good colour and greyscale performance. The secondary effect is CIS scanners are lighter and CIS scanners can be safely moved without pixel alignment (stitch) failure.
The single CIS sensor made the portable SmartLF Scan! possible and practical.

In both CCD and CIS scanners a clear glass lies between the image sensors and scanned document. Again time has seen significant innovation with modern glass having a smoother, harder surface, resulting in a much more scratch resistant surface. It's a simple fact that many older documents may be dusty and dirty so the hardened glass really helps to minimise wear.

Mechanical and electronic innovations are well supported by 30 years of continuous advances with software. One aim is a make the software really easy to use and ensure that general scanning can be a walk in and use service. A second aim is to get a great scan from many types of images. Take blue prints for instance. Most blue prints are uneven across the surface. Customers would like the same output as from a black line pen plot. So Colortrac software offers special features for positive and negative blue prints. Some maps are printed from 3 to 5 colours arranged in dot patterns. Again Colortrac software offers features to minimise moire effects between the image dots and sensor pixels. Everyone loves a great a sky with a myriad of subtle tonal changes. Rendering this type of detail is optimised with high resolution CCD scanners and Colortrac professional software. To achieve all these objectives Colortrac offers 2 Windows based software products, TWAIN and Printer drivers, Apple and Android applications.

All this feature building can result in some complexity for a new user and the Colortrac website has a number of videos to help a user understand the wide range of image types the software features provided to create an excellent scanned image.
(Copy this link "https://www.colortrac.com/videos/")
Take another look at the Colortrac logo. It is a graphic reminder printers create round dots and scanners (and cameras) create square dots and Colortrac scanners can handle that.

On 2nd April 2025 Colortrac announced Colortrac Scanners, both SmartLF SGi (CCD) and SmartLF SCi (CIS) office models are now FADGI 3-star compliant, meeting recognised standards for image quality set by the US Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI). In many markets, FADGI compliance is becoming a benchmark requirement in public sector procurement, particularly in digitisation projects involving archives, libraries, and museums.
?Achieving the 3-star FADGI compliance Colortrac Scanners are recognised as meeting image quality benchmarks used by the most demanding institutions without adding cost or complexity to the user.? says Jacob Bendix, CCO and VP of Sales and Marketing at Colortrac.
Each SmartLF SCi scanner, with patented SingleSensor CIS technology, and each SmartLF SGi CCD scanners continue to be fast, reliable, and cost-effective. Now the added option of providing FADGI-compliant scan results when operated with the latest version of the SmartWorks Imaging software. If your scanner already uses a regisitered copy, a free upgrade is available to you. To test SmartWorks Imaging contact Hassan (hassan@mandeno.co.nz) to arrange a trail version.
About FADGI compliance:- FADGI relies upon well-established practices, objective measurements, and quality assurance methods to create accurate imaging. The purpose is to reduce variabilities that may be introduced by the scanning process and human subjectivity.
FADGI is world-leading but compares to programs like Metamorfoze and ISO-19264-1. ISO 19264-1 B and Metamorfoze Light, which while comparable to FADGI 3-star, get their results through different imaging approaches.

COLORTRAC Flat Bed Scanner

The SmartLF ivo 6000 from Colortrac.
A non-contact, flat bed scanner for items and objects with thickness ranging from a single sheet of paper to maximum height of 130mm.

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