HIAR™ is a very high performance multi-user image management system. It scans paper to create digital images, electronically distributes documents and sustains a secure long term archive. HIAR is widely scalable. Fast single-user configurations perform more functions than a microfilm system at a lower life cycle cost. With hundreds of users sharing up to 100 million pages, HIAR can still retrieve images in less than one second. HIAR is perfect for interfacing to legacy systems or large databases that manage the documents’ data and control their workflow. Complete imaging solutions range from $17K and up. Macintosh, DOS/Windows & UNIX are supported.
Macintosh-based imaging systems have always been at the high end of performance due to its technical advantages. Although the 68K family is well suited for graphics work, the PowerPC chip is absolutely amazing. A tax form that takes 200 msec to decompress and scale 3:1 on a 33/66 MHz 68040 takes just 48 msec on a 66 MHz PowerPC! This is more than four times faster using the same CPU clock speed!
This performance is important in letting people work with electronic images the way they do with paper. For example, think of how you file incoming letters. They are just dropped in a folder with your name on it, in order by date received. No one takes the time to type fields into a database or index documents within a folder like that. You find things by starting at around the right date and then very quickly flipping through until you see something you recognize. That's exactly what this technology does for imaged documents. You can easily flip through a hundred pages to find something you're looking for.
Setup
• Drag the “HIAR Folder” from the CD to your hard disk. Open the “HIAR Folder” and discard the HIAR version not needed for your processor (68K or PPC). The demo should also run from the CD, somewhat slower.
• The 68K version runs only on a 68020, 68030 or 68040. System 7 is required.
• The PPC version runs on any Power Macintosh.
• HIAR Voice Notes requires a Macintosh with built-in microphone support.
• Portrait or 19" or larger monitors are recommended. Optimal performance is achieved on a 1660 x 1200 pixel monitor. (14" monitors do work also.)
• 4 MB RAM is recommended for the HIAR demo.
Running a Demonstration
The main point of this demo is processor speed applied to document imaging tasks. The HIAR demo program provides the document retrieval and display functions of a client on a client/server network used to distribute documents.
• When you start the demo, HIAR will immediately ask you to select an index. The only choice in the list is an index called “DOS-type Names”. Click the Select button.
• Pick Retrieve from the Archive menu.
• Type the letter “T” into the Document Name dialog box. Then click the » button to retrieve the first document in the index with a name that starts with “T”. This should be “TIFFCOVR.001”.
• Click the » button again to retrieve the next document in the index. This should be “TIFFSPEC.001”. Notice the responce time. What you just did was opened a TIFF file, decompressed the data and scaled it to fit the window.
• Now click and hold down the > button to flip through the pages of the document. These wil be“TIFFSPEC.002”, 3, 4, etc. This “page flip rate” on the 68040 should be about 2 pages per second. On a Power Macintosh, it will be in excess of 5 pages per second!
• Try the functions under the Image menu. Notice the responce time. Fast on the 680x0, but absolutely instantaneous on the PowerPC processor. If you're using a 1660x1200 pixel screen, this provides all the performance needed to really replace paper.
Points of Interest
• The standard File menu Open pick can also be used to display TIFF files, but the File/Open list only displays a few thousand file names at maximum. Since HIAR is designed to handle up to 100 million documents in one archive, HIAR also offers the Retrieve method for opening TIFF files.
• This demo is limited to Group 4 compressed data, up to 200 dpi, up to legal size.
• The sub folder called “ImageServer” emulates some of the function of a server on the network. The HIAR demo is functioning basically as an image retrieval client.
• The document names in the index are constrained to be DOS file-names to provide compatability with servers that must also serve DOS machines. On all Macintosh and UNIX environments, this constraint is not necessary.
• Page flipping consists of opening a TIFF file, reading it, decompressing the data, scaling and rotating the image. All of this is happening at over 5 pages per second on the Power Mac. The display time on some systems is faster if the Monitors Control Panel is set to Black&White (1-bit) and if the Image window is completely exposed. On small monitors, resize the image window so that the Retrieve dialog can be dragged off of the top of the image window.
Contact
Cordant Imaging Systems
50 Stiles Pond Rd., P.O. Box 462, West Boxford, Ma. 01885 USA
