Scanning like a Genius in 1991
Vložit
- čas přidán 25. 11. 2019
- This video is about the Geniscan 4000, a popular hand scanner from the end of the eighties, early nineties. Popular in both PC and Amiga / Atari circles.
Join me as I give you a tour of the hardware and the software, install and use it on my 286 PC, and show you how we were scanning away just like we did in the early nineties ! - Věda a technologie
Scan a color photo through red, green, and blue transparencies then import the three into a modern image editor to merge them.
That I did back in 1989, using a copy machine to do they color sheets and and black too, together in a bitmap file, or apple paint? what did u used?
Was the Genius app able to do this, or did I needed Photoshop for that, that part I just forgot, the ISA card i still own too, i know what it is now.
I recognize the graphics fonts being used in the software - Borland Graphics Interface, BGI - they probably developed the software with Borland Turbo Pascal or Turbo C, which were very popular development tools for the early days of PCs.
Ohhh, those days of BGI drivers...
I remembered back then, we we're authorized reseller of Genius products, we always advised customers that the users must have a steady hand..
There were scanner trays introduced too which guided your hand to complete the scan with better control and alignment
I didn't even know scanners existed that early. But I would have been in 7th grade in 1991...
I had one of those! It actually paid for itself by allowing me to scan a ton of items for a contract I had at the time. The client was amazed at what I could do.
Those were a lot of fun. My dad had one and I could play for hours with that thing!
The Philips IMB clone on Genius mouse was what we had as a family system, the GS 4000 we did found years later, 1989? cheep!
We loved the Genius drivers and toolset, making it able to get the mouse in DOS software.
My school work included all these great images scanned in 400 dpi, I loved the style, the thumbwheel was magic!
My first job, was servicing the Philips computers at the Amsterdam local government during college.
I remember one classroom having a hand scanner and we used it to scan in basically anything we could, like our faces (not really workable unless you have a very flat face), our hands, and a knitted sweater (which produced a rather beautiful pattern). I'm sure at some point one of us would've scanned our balls or something but, alas, we didn't have time.
How could anyone have a flat face. Your nose is always going to stick out.
I remember those hand scanners. And dr genius. Used to have it on our olivetti m240 xt machine.
Dithering is the word you were looking for in regards to the photo modes.
I‘ve never seen this in action. Funny thing in 91.
What baffles me is the speed of the graphics software, considering this runs on a 12.5MHz 286! It all seems rather quick and flashy for the time! Now this is only 1 bit color, no greyscale, so it's easy to manipulate... But sometimes Photoshop doesn't seem so smooth on my 5th gen Intel NUC.
I remember playing around with a Genius handscanner, but I don't remember it all being that reaposive. Probably we ran in on an XT. I remember the looks of that Philips pc so vividly, a pal of mine had a Philips XT which had about the same eastetics.
Great video, back from a time when computers had a charm and excitement around them. Nowadays they're al alike. I have such fond memories of getting your first Adlib or SB card working, and things like your first scan or first printout.
Thanks for the vid!
Some of the footage was accelerated , but the software was definitely usable. The scanning + manipulations in 200dpi were pretty responsive
that was the year before i left school, i also had the amiga then, & a hand scanner!
Warching this video truly brought me back to my memories. I used to own that 3-button Genius mouse. I read those Dr. Genius manual book albeit never actually used it since I couldn't use it when I started to grasp on how to use a PC because my newer PC only had a 3 inch diskette, not the 5 inch one.
I am really really sad to remember that all that legacy was basically thrown away by my parents when we moved out to other city since we thought that it is no longer usable and started to become obsolete in year 2000. Now 20+ years have passed and I realized that this is actually a masterpiece legacy we should have been preserving 🥺
I remember this, I never owned one, but I did see it in PC magazine adverts.
In reference to helping the scanning software learn the characters being scanned, it was a lot faster and a lot less work to transcribe the text manually, spending the time helping the scanner to learn the text, and still having to correct it later. Kudos to the programmers-important steps towards what we have today.
In my teenage days, I came across two variants of this scanner, but I never got them working.
I got this toy back in a day. Nostalgia :DDDD
yeah it was nice to use it again ... also had fond memories of it.
My uncle installed a Logitech ScanMan hand scanner on my Headstart LX-CD (an 8088). I didn't get much use out of it: black and white, grainy, prone to misaligned / crooked or bunched / stretched scans due to variables in surfaces and drag speed (e.g. scanning from a textbook is awkward), and no text-recognition software to put what I scanned into a document as anything but an embedded image which I'd have to cleanup first.
It was highly impractical compared to a flatbed scanner.
This monitor is very similar to my Olivetti PCS286 original VGA monitor!!!
I had NO idea that scanners even existed in 1991! I would have been a kid then, around 13-14 years old, and I know for sure I never saw anything like that in real life back then. I don't know why. I didn't use a scanner until at least 1997-1998.
The strangest scanner for home use had to be the ThunderScan. It replaced the ribbon cartridge in a Apple ImageWriter dot matrix printer. Scanned one line at a time as the image or document was rolled through.
Nice. I had almost that exact setup with mouse and scanner on a Philips 286. Thanks for sharing this.
I had exactly the same scanner in the late 80s on my 286 :) Thanks for sharing!
Used to have one of these, even had it in it's original case (molded book-like plastic case). Lost it along with a lot of other old computer parts in a house fire (still had all the original manuals and disks).
I had a scanner very similar to that that I bought around 1994. It was that basic shape and worked the same way but was color. I believe it was an Epson brand. I had to really scan slowly to get a good scan. Also I ran out of my 12MB of ram many times.
This one should work on an xt with 640kb of ram :) Crazy when you think about how people did stuff like desktop publishing and ocr in an ms-dos environment. No multitasking, constantly converting file formats, switching programs .... and still they also got the job done.
@@RetroSpector78 I remember the PC I purchased with a 486DX 66Mhz cpu, 400MB hdd and 4MB of ram. When I upgraded the ram to 12MB, my buddy at the time was really impressed with 12MB of ram. It's crazy that now a low end laptop will have at least 2GB of ram and my desktop has 32GB. If I had a time machine, I'd love to bring back a modern laptop and freak some people out with it.
My first computer was a 286 with the same Genius mouse.
That was a neat retro video
I realllllly wanted one as a kid but never got one. I had a 24 pin matrix printer back then, thought it would be awesome to scan some photos from books, manipulate them and then print them. Never got one sadly.
Nice! I had that exact same mouse. I played with the scanner, but never had one.
Thanks for the video ! I had a Logitech scan man with an isa card growing up. I think it might have been the same unit just re branded as logitech, I think it was also made in Taiwan. I had a nifty little accessory that acted as a guide to scan straight at all times. The trick was always keeping the correct pace.
That "smear" is actually the scanner / paper moving. The same thing will happen on a real scanner if you bump it.
i just picked up a couple new in box 800 dpi black & white handheld scanners from Identity Systems Technology Inc a couple of weeks ago. Had one out to play around with. I hadn't seen this tech before but it was pretty cool!
Wow, that looks actually really usable device for it's age. I loaned similar device, but iirc it required WIn95 and can't remember if it connected via serial or usb1 port. I do remember that I had to use quite slow movement to prevent buffer from overloading and ruining scan. I didn't even think that these were available for Dos or Amiga. OCR feature has been really lackluster imo until actually last couple years, when it became to be somewhat usable. I suppose they work much better in English, but pretty much any other language they've been total garbage. Or at least in my experience I've always typed something like page much faster than I could scan and correct. Nice review, I really enjoy to see stuff like this that has been around when I was young, but didn't have access to.
My dad had a GeniScan GS C105. Fun little device, although it's long gone by now
I got a logitech one second hand in the mid 90's and i used it with my P75.
I think i still have it and also the P75.
Yep, I had a similar handheld scanner for my Amiga 😀
I remember using this. Awesome device back then. Totally useless for real work but there were no cheap alternatives. Fun though
I make tooooo many scans using this in 90s
I had one of these for the Amiga, it was good in its day for greyscale, but was useless for OCR. I may still have it in the loft somewhere.
Nice video
Also have the GeniScan GS4500; came with the same software. Fur sure something cool to play with. Also remember the GM6 mouse. Still have the box, lost the mouse though.
By the way, the scan of the mainboard manual looks familiar, is this the PC Chips M321 (or something similar)?
impressive that the text interperter is basically just a manual learning algorithm
all you gotta do is automate it by havinga digital version of the scanned text or train it via single letters
We had a handscanner on our own back in the day but I can't recall what it was named like or which brand it came from.
I was too young but I found the looks of that thing highly interesting.
The nostalgia. I believe we had a similar scanner from Logitech. I don't remember the interface, but I don't remember an expansion card for it either, so I believe we had one that ran through the parallel port or something (Serial would've likely been impossible because we had only a DB-9 connector for COM1, no DB-25 as COM2). It took us a few years until we could switch to (I believe) a SCSI flatbed scanner. And today, the scanner I have is an AIO printer.
I used to have one a long-long time ago for my Amiga 1000!
Yep. Also very popular in Amiga circles
I remember using a hand scanner at school on the Acorn Archimedes.
Interesting with that 8 pin mini din. I did an internet search and some have the center pin offset, and others have it in the center. If it ever needs replacement you'll want to carefully compare photos.
I still have one in my spare room
I wonder what color images would look like ... using the color filter technique (3 separate passes, using a red/green/blue transparencies over the image) and combining the images (there's a little more to the processing, but yes, you should be able to get color scans from a B&W scanner -- at least you could from a cheap B&W 90s webcam)
I had a logitech hand scanner back in the 90s
In the ‘80 I had an Atari PC3 XT and bought myself a genius mouse because I wanted 3 buttons. The dr genius program came with it but at that time it was called dr halo and it would only start/work if you had a 3 button mouse and the genius mouse driver loaded.
cool! I have the slimier scanner by A4Tech I fond the software but I am missing the calibration papers
I used to use this one back in the school, horrible device for a graphic artist, lovely memory :D
I have a Logitech bus mouse card with a nearly identical layout (save for the connector) to that scanner interface card.
I rembember the Genius Mouse, I've got one of those that came with my dad's 486 in 1992. Still got all the floppy's. Sadly the applications don't seem to run a Pentium 2 (maybe too modern?), appearantly they don't want to work with a ps/2 mouse. I've also got Dr. halo but isn't that an earlier version of Dr. Genius?
Mini connector i have something similar on my Yaesu radio and my SUN Ultra1 (keyboard /mouse)
You said in the video it used "LEDs" for the scanning, but white LEDs didn't exist back then. Was it just a regular light bulb or maybe a small florescent?
I used to have one of those, for my 486 DX 50 back in the day. Interesting technology, but never found any real use for it.
Would it be possible to upload the text images somewhere?
Nice! What brand of 286 PC is that?
Philips 286. Have a whole video on it (should be a card up somewhere in the beginning of this video)
I notice I have a GeniScan GS-4500 hand scanner - can I use it as a barcode reader ?
My mom bought a colour one, with a similar PS2 style connector. It was hot garbage but still fun to use. Yeah the OCR was really bad.
Does it working windows? Is windows three working on that 286 PC?
Are you from Belgium or another European country ? Because i see that you have french/dutch language on your Rummikub notice.
Belgium :)
+Lonyx - Well spotted! :)
Why don't You install Win3.1 on Your PC?🤔
I tried a modern "vacuum cleaner" one, the same in this format, and it sucked bad :( it was like a scanner wand or something, it was pretty terrible. This seemed way more promising.
You meant _teach_ or _train_ the OCR application program, not "learn" it. Saying learn in that sense is informal to the point of being incorrect.
@@thebiggerbyte5991 Agreed -- but not to the extent where we'd deny him feedback, because that's how people learn.
@@thebiggerbyte5991 Sure -- I have a hunch on that, and you have a hunch on that, which is fair enough, but why not just leave it up to RetroSpector78 to decide if the feedback is welcome or not? I don't think Retro or I need a third party to behaviour-police our interaction, no offence.
@@thebiggerbyte5991 Again, in my experience most people who have room to improve appreciate the kind of feedback I shared with Retro, in your opinion they don't. We've already established that, and that's fine. Yet you've then decided to step in as the self-appointed behaviour police, and when it's been pointed out to you that your third wheel attempt to be the big wheel is not especially polite to the persons actually involved, you've started to litigate the question, you've appealed to authority, and you've portrayed yourself as the senior teacher and implicitly sought to assign me the junior teacher role under you. No thanks. Have a nice day.
My father had one of these. Isn't "Dr.Genius" suspiciously similar to "Dr.Halo"? xD
I used Dr. Halo 25 years ago from my school, but I am sure my dad also used to have Dr. Genius in our home as we used to have the manual book, but I never used it since it was in 5 inch diskette which I don't have anymore on my "newer" intel PC.
I think he got that when he bought the Genius mouse. Perhaps it comes as bundled.
IT'S A FAAAKE!
Its plagio LGR channel