Open letter to Fujitsu: free your software

A friend recently pointed out Fujitsu’s new scanner (Fujitsu PA03641-B005 Document Scanner), and it is quite impressive.

    There are two problems that I can see however

    1) Moving parts

Any digital technology that has moving parts will not last long, given the nature of wear and tear. (Parts moving wear down through friction, etc.)  Fujitsu could have designed something more akin to a fixed camera.

    2) Impressive software is locked

This is actually typical of the company; the software cannot be used with images not produced by its scanner. This is an old ‘lock’ technique, which one would assume would have gone by the wayside years ago, and does show a different ‘mindset’ from that typically seen in the United States.

    Fujitsu needs to ‘free’ its software, by removing this dependancy to its hardware.

    The scanning software is impressive because a) easily removes ‘fingers’ from image and 2) ‘flattens’ a curved page. 

    If one could apply this to all sorts of digital archives, his would help to revolutionise many areas, given that once flattened, ALL IMAGES COULD BE SUBJECTED TO OCR (optical character recognition).  At the moment, curved images are not adequately scanned by OCR.