Scanning quality is one of the most important functions for our service. In-depth testing is performed to strike a balance between download speed and image quality. Here’s a brief discussion of our scanning process and how we go beyond the industry norm to bring you high quality scanning to your mail and mail pages.
Factors Affecting Scan Quality
Scanning is an art and a science. If you’ve ever owned a scanner, you would understand the pain of getting scanned pages to look good on screen.
Similar to taking photos with a camera, the goal in scanning a page to capture as much detail, color, and light as you can. The result you want is a picture that shows colors as close as possible to the real thing.
Scanned image quality is generally affected by two factors – color depth and scan resolution.
Color Depth
The higher the bit depth, the more colors you can capture. More colors means better image quality. Scanners typically can scan up to 48-bit color depth. For comparison, most computer monitors these days are 24-bit or 32-bit. 24-bit color depth gives you a possible total of 16.7 million colors.
Scan Resolution
Scan resolution measures how many pixels are actually used to represent image data within a specified space and is usually measured in Pixels Per Inch (PPI), also known as Dots Per Inch (DPI). The higher the number of pixels per inch, the better the quality of your image.
Ever tried blowing up a photo you took with your digital camera at 5-megapixel resolution? When a 5-megapixel image is printed on “5×7″ photo paper, the quality is good and the photo looks great. But try enlarging and printing the same photo onto a 12″x16″ paper and you’ll start to notice how the photo seems more blurry. If you look at the photo up close, you may even see small color dots. Basically, a 5-megapixel photo usually does not contain enough pixel information for you to enlarge your photo and still retain good quality.
The higher the resolution, the more you can zoom in without losing clarity.
Scanning Your Postal Mail
High-end scanners are used to scan your mail and your mail pages. Scans are done in high resolution, full color. No extra costs or fees.
Green Tip: Save Printer Toner
Higher resolution uses more ink to print. Unless you’re printing color photos or graphics, you can save toner costs and print more by setting your print resolution at 150 or 300 PPI.
Incoming mail envelopes are scanned at 200 PPI in full color. Mail page scanning is scanned between 200 and 300 DPI. As comparison, a normal LCD monitor displays pixels at 72 PPI and a printer prints at 150, 300, and 600 PPI resolutions.
There are several reasons why we choose to scan mail at a minimum of 200 PPI.
File Size vs. Speed
File size increases as scanning resolution goes higher. Downloading your postal mail images will take longer. Scrolling extremely large images will also take longer in the browser (especially on Internet Explorer). Basically, everything takes longer to accomplish.
If you were on a broadband, large file sizes usually do not pose a problem. However, there are noticeable lags and slow responses once you are on a slow Internet connection or an older computer. The 200 PPI is chosen as the best quality while still retaining the overall interaction experience when viewing mail online.
Practicality
Simple benchmarks are performed to find the optimal resolution that gives you the best perceived quality needed to make your mail legible both online and on paper. Extensive test results show that a 200 DPI with advanced image post-processing gives comparable, if not better, quality to 300 DPI with basic image post-processing. In consideration of the practicality and the file size vs. bandwidth issue, we decided to go with the first option.
Scanning is one of the most important processes in our business and we put effort and investment into making sure that you get the best quality and experience. We hope that this informative article gives you a better idea about our scanning process and how we care for your mail.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hello,
I want to know if there are limitations on the quality incoming documents for scanning, meaning, if a package is sent to you and I request that it be scanned and the pages are, say, less than new or perfect, can you still scan it, or will it be damaged and not recoverable?
You can request to have some mail items rescanned if there are issues with the scanning quality. We’ll be more than happy to do this for you.