tell me about scanner maintenance

Scanner calibration should become a habit for those who value high quality and precision in their results. Much too often, incorrect output on expensive media would have been avoided if the scanner had recently been calibrated.

Calibration is the process of setting the scanner device to known color conditions so that it performs in accordance with an established standard. When you calibrate your scanner to the ANSI IT8 color standard, you minimize color deviations between scanned ANSI IT8 reference color patches (on the IT8 Calibration reference sheet) and known color reference values.

The calibrating wizard lets you select between sRGB and NTSC color spaces. With the sRGB standard you get optimal color matching between your touch screen, scanner and printer.

Scanner calibration ensures stability, reproducibility and predictability of color output. Light sources and other parts in the scanner can change over time and this affects the scanner's interpretation of colors and its linearity. Without calibration, the output produced by your scanner half a year from now will differ from output produced today and will likely be noticeably inaccurate. Some monochrome scanners support basic calibration. Basic calibration reduces noise in the dynamic area and ensures stable and clean scans. When scanning at high resolutions, even the tiniest dust particles can cause unwanted speckles in your output. Calibration can help reduce this kind of noise and ensure clean scans every time.

We recommend scanner maintenance once a month.

Service preventive maintenance should be performed every two years (this has to be performed by a service engineer).

By calibrating the scanner at regular intervals (once a month), you ensure that all files created are based on the same color scheme. Thus, the results you get from your system are predictable, so you don't have to waste time and money experimenting to get the right result.

Scanner color calibration must be performed regularly and it is recommended to calibrate just before creating new Media Profiles through closed loop calibration. The scanner's calibration is crucial for the color matching process to work properly.