image to cad prints

I was asked to give a price for converting hard copies to cad, I priced on either scaning and tracing in cad or digitizing. I was undercut by a company who offer vector conversions (I'm not bitter:-). My previous experience with vector conversions is that they don't work very well, this was some years ago so they have probably improved somewhat, the output cad drawing had loads of little lines that made up one big line, it didn't recognixe the text and also made them loads of lines, by the end of it I still had to trace over the output drawing which took a similar sort of time as just tracing over a bmp. Are there better vector conversion programs out there?, ones which when converting say a rectangle the output drawing has only the 4 lines as 4 entities and not 5000 little lines. any suggestions on which program I should check out will be greatly appreciated, I'm gonna go on google as well but were all professionals here (supposedly) so your opinions would usefull too.
TIA
Mark

Download thge evaluation copy of Scan2CAD 7 from their web site and give it a go, version 7 also has OCR
You will find links on my AutoCAD FAQ Page at http://www.cadalot.co.uk
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Mark,
Raster conversion technology has come been considerably modernised by the WinTopo project. There is a freeware program that is very good, and a 'pro' (pay) version that is excellent. This program produces a very accurate vector representation of the scanned image, and it produces no more lines than are necessary to capture the detail. There are some 'Polyline Reduction' settings to trade-off number of lines against level of detail. The user interface is friendly and pleasant on the eye, and looks very professional (even the freeware!), and it is very quick. We use it daily for converting scanned images into CAD drawings. Visit http://www.wintopo.com to try it out and see for yourself.
Tom.
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