(Archived) Scanning to Evernote - best choice of quality

[klas 2]

I'm about to enter the paperless society, thanks to Evernote and a decent scanner. However, I'm hesitating since I'm not sure which resolution/image quality to choose.

*One idea is to have high dpi images, so as to be able to print them out with more or less the same quality as the originals.

*The other thing to consider is to make it optimize it for Evernote. Browsing the forums, I found some posts about EN slowing down because of large pdf's.

It seems having one quality for Evernote and one for the files, stored on the hard drive, would be a tedious workflow. Or is there a way to automatically compress pdf's when moving them to Evernote (I'm on a Mac)? Any other workaround?

My idea to go is to scan to pdf in 300 dpi, perhaps some fivehundred pages. And then I would add new material as it arrives. So: it seems crucial that I choose the right and smart move from the start.

All input is most welcome, cheers!

[engberg 89]

If you are using a decent scanner, and you're scanning clean black-on-white text, then you definitely don't need more than 300dpi. I've even seen good results from 150 or 200dpi modes.

More importantly for file size, you can use "black and white" mode instead of grayscale or color. These other modes make much larger documents, and are more appropriate for scanning something with pictures.

[klas 2]

Alright, thanks for the info! But how about mixed content - such as if I scan some business cards together, or a page from a magazine. To preserve quality for printouts, I'd prefer to go color. If I would do it in 300 dpi the size could be around 500k, pdf-format.

Would that be only a question of storage space (and thus free / premium account)? Or would it be hampering the speed of the (so far) very responsive EN application? That is, searching, opening notes etcm which for now are very swift operations.

For example: would 200 pages of 300k each do less impact than 200 pages of 500k each? Or will the engine remain unaffected in both cases?

Btw: on my scanner (CanoScan Lide 200) I have settings in the scanning software for Descreen and Unsharp mask. Would such settings make accuracy of the Evernote ocr handling better?

(pardon me for asking about what I reckon are basics, but I'm really a freshman when it comes to scanning :? )

All help is greatly appreciated, cheers!

[engberg 89]

I don't think that 200 pages at 300k each would have a noticeable performance difference compared to the same 200 pages at 500k each if you used them the same. We're working on a few scalability improvements in the clients, but I don't think that particular difference would affect much other than the synchronization time. E.g. if you had 4GB in your account and you lost your computer, you'd need to wait longer for a full resync to a clean laptop than if your database was only 2GB.

Unfortunately, I'm not to familiar with how their "descreen" and "unsharp" work. My gut instict is to not mess around with these settings too much if the scans look readable without them. I have a hunch that they'd be throwing away a little bit of information which might be useful to our processing, but hard to say for sure without a lot of testing.