TAC purchased its first scanner in 1997.  It was late in the "shopping around experience" that the WideCom came into play.  One of our employees caught an ad in a trade magazine and found it to be quite interesting.  Of course, it was an ad for the WideCom large format document scanner.  Up until that time, we had not found a scanner that was really pushing the accuracy of scale retention.  This is something we found to be a very desirable feature.  Upon reading the material on the WideCom, it was discovered that the scale retention was fantastic due to the fiber-optic scan head.  This machine is designed like a fax machine, it uses no lenses, but rather, a band of fiber optics that is locked into position for a positive scale transmission of the image it captures. Lenses seem to distort the fringes of a drawing where the fiber optic system holds scale on the edges the same as at the midpoints. Manufactured in India and marketed through Ontario Canada, we have found this scanner to be extremely well built, maintenance free (except regular dusting and cleaning) and easy to use.

The SLC436C scanner can be used in monochrome or color modes.  In color scanning, the scan types include "Full color" at 16,700,000 colors; 256 colors (8 bits per pixel); 16 colors (4 bits per pixel); and 256 grays (gray scale, 8 bits per pixel).  Extension selections include JPEG, TIFF JPEG, TIFF, LZW, TIFF UNCOMPRESSED AND WINDOWS BITMAP.