Scanners
With a scanner you can do a lot of cools things like include a map from a brochure in a travel it...
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With a scanner you can do a lot of cools things like include a map from a brochure in a travel itinerary, an old document in a history paper or hand-written texts or drawings in a report. You can also use it to digitalize your old paper photos and slides. More and more offices also decide to be more environmentally friendly and scans document and distributes them electronically instead of printing them. If you just need to make a copy of a document now and then, almost any scanner on the market will do that, but photos, negatives or slides, for example, demand a lot more – if you are really serious about it perhaps you should even have a special scanner just for that purpose.
Key issues for scanners are mainly resolution and scanning speed, the higher the better. Of the two main techniques mostly used in scanners, CCD and CIS, CCD is the best one. The most common connection today is USB. If you go for a USB scanner be sure to buy one with a high speed connection which in most cases is enough, and if you need a quicker connection a FireWire one might be a good choice.
Many manufacturers often pack their scanners with a software pack like OCR, pdf and/or photo editing software. Some of these softwares may be useful, but beware as some only includes light versions. Most important, if you scan text documents, is that the OCR software – software that scans the text and creates a word processing document of it so that you for example could edit the text – is of a good quality.
Then there is the question of which accessories you should get. A document feeder is useful if you often scan several documents in a row. If you want to digitalize your old paper photos or slides there are equipments to do so available on the market, and they are even included in some scanners. The scanners specialized in photo scanning are often somewhat more expensive but, on the other hand, the results are much better and the handling of slides or negatives much, much easier – which means a lot if you have a lot of them. Not all of us use the scanner frequently; if so, make sure that it is either small or that if you put it away while not in use it is easy to reconnect it to your computer.
So when you have decided how and to what you are going to use your scanner, look for the tests of interesting models, bring some photos and/or document with you and scan them to compare the results.
TIP:
Make sure that your scanner comes with good pdf software so that you can create pdf files of important documents that you don’t want to be altered.