Hamrick Software, the developer of VueScan, the world's most widely used scanning software, celebrates 10 years of development by giving all previous purchasers a free upgrade to VueScan 8.5.

December 15, 2008 - Hamrick Software, the developer of VueScan, the world's most widely used scanning software, has released it’s latest version 8.5 – with more than 600 improvements since the release of VueScan 8.4 two years ago.

"We've been working on VueScan for 10 years and have made thousands of improvements in this time.  We'd like to thank everyone who has purchased VueScan in the past by giving them a free upgrade to VueScan 8.5" says Ed Hamrick, President of Hamrick Software.

VueScan 0.1 was first released in 1998 with support for a single scanner on Windows only. Within 5 years VueScan supported more than 400 scanners, and had acquired a good reputation through word of mouth. After a further 10 years of development, VueScan now supports over 1200 scanners on 3 operating systems, has been downloaded more than 5 million times, and is the scanning program of choice for more than 170,000 customers worldwide.

“For the past ten years we have continued to add support for more scanners, and we've added hundreds of features that customers have asked for.  Since we first released VueScan 8.4 two years ago, we've made more than 600 improvements and it’s really changed a lot in this time.“ says Ed Hamrick. “We have many small but clearly defined features that make a world of difference for many of our customers. Some features are for photographers, some for people working with thousands of scans, some are for beginners who have never used a scanner.  We've also worked hard to support scanners that manufacturers don't support any more, especially on Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)."

Some major improvements since VueScan 8.4 include support for multi-core processors, skew correction and multi-page documents.  Support for multi-core processors means that many scans are up to 50% faster when using a dual-core processor.  No other scanning software has multi-core support, and for users working with very large files this results in a significant time saving. The largest performance improvements are with infrared cleaning, grain reduction and descreening.  Skew correction means that any document or photo that has been placed in the scanner slightly askew (rotated) can now be straightened from within VueScan, without the need to physically rotate the document or image and then rescanning.

Multi-page document support for inexpensive flatbed scanners allows users to scan both single-sided and two-sided documents in any page order, using scanners with or without document feeders. Many options are available, including scanning two sided documents with a single-side document feeder, scanning from last page to first page (or the reverse), and re-ordering and deleting pages. Multi-page documents can be saved to either PDF files or TIFF files.

"Our goal is to make VueScan the universal scanning application. We now support over 1200 scanners on Windows, 750 on Mac OS X and 580 scanners on Linux. A single 5 Mbyte download supports all these scanners, in 35 different languages." says Ed Hamrick.

"Our next goal is to add more advanced scanning features, such as scanning multiple photos placed randomly on a scanner (auto image segmentation) and integrating Google's Optical Character Recognition (OCR) code. All of these advanced scanning features will work with all of the 1200 supported scanners,
in all 35 languages, on all three operating systems - a truly universal scanning application."

VueScan is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. VueScan offers a full range of advanced features; including options for scanning faded slides and prints and automatically adjusting images to optimum color balance that reduces the need to manually do it in Photoshop. It includes built-in IT8
color calibration of scanners, producing colors that look true to life, batch scanning and other advanced and powerful scanning and productivity features, including PDF output.

For a detailed listing of VueScan features, see: http://www.hamrick.com/abo.html.

VueScan is available in two editions, Standard Edition ($39.95 USD) and Professional Edition ($79.95). The Professional Edition adds unlimited free upgrades, advanced IT8 color calibration and support for raw scan files. Multi-user licenses are available. A fully functional, trial copy of VueScan can be downloaded from http://www.hamrick.com/.