Scanners How to select one

Scanners are now at reasonable prices and would make nice additions to your home/business computers. Prices range from $150 to $500. Before you purchase your scanner select a unit that can serve all your purposes. Are you going to use it with your fax machine or do you wish to do "high end" scanning (i.e. slides, negatives, transparencies)?

Don't confuse the resolution on your printer with scanner resolution. Opt for a scanner with a horizontal resolution of at least 400 dpi and minimum 30-bit color (36 is preferable). Insure that your scanner package is shipped with a standard ICC profile (under win 98) or a custom color-matching and color calibration tools. If you plan to scan text documents and use OCR (optical character recognition) you will need a resolution of 400 dpi min (dots per inch). OCR enables the scanner to read, interpret and export images (pictures) of text into a format which can be read and manipulated by any of the popular word processing programs.

Resolution specifications (dpi) of scanners will determine how much "real information" a scanner captures from the image. Further refinement of an image can be achieved by using various optical enhancements "to fill in the blanks" so to speak between the actual "scanned" pixels of the image and its digital reproduction. For general purpose scanning 300-400 dpi is good, further "refinements" will interpolate up to 1200 dpi.600 dpi is good for detailed images, line art, and photographs. If you wish to scan slides and films you will need 1,200 dpi.

Another consideration factor is the method used to connect your scanner to the computer. Most low cost scanners use parallel ports with a pass through connection to a printer. On the down side parallel ports can be slow when utilizing high resolution scanning. Any scanner with an optical resolution of 600 x 600 dpi and color depth of 30 bits will have its own card (SCSI). The SCSI can handle higher data (read faster speed) and is ideal for print graphics and high volume document management. A lower price unit with a SCSI connection and lower resolution are generally older outdated models.

A third method of connection is the USB-compliant devices. They are cheap, easy to install, and are more common with new WIN98 operating systems which has the necessary drivers for the USB cards. If the material you wish to scan is larger than letter size look at flatbed scanners that can handle legal size documents, or move up to the tabloid size scanner (11 by 17). Generally speaking, SCSI connections are faster than USB connections which are faster than parallel port connections.

Consideration should be given to the software package that accompanies the scanner; if you are an advanced user then you might consider a software package that lets you control a wide range of image attributes.

Finally: why should one get a scanner? Well you can turn those old photographs that are loosely cluttered around the house into a digital family photo album and, once you become familiar with the software, you might be able to improve the digital image of the original photo. A family web site, complete with graphics is a good project or the scanner can be used as an occasional photo copier. Paper documents can be scanned with OCR to import the document into your favorite word processor. As well you could send photos of your kids to grandparents, relatives and friends via e-mai