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Scanners are interesting beasts — and man, you get a lot of bang for your buck! In fact, a perfectly serviceable USB scanner (as shown in Figure 1) is waiting for you at your local Maze O' Wires store for under $100, and it can do all the following things:
Figure 1: This scanner can bring all sorts of printed material to your PC monitor.
- Produce digital images from magazine and book pages, photographs, and just about any other printed material. These images can later be edited to your heart's content, sent as an e-mail attachment, or recorded to CD or DVD.
- Read text from a printed document into your word processor. This trick is called optical character recognition (OCR) and can save you hours of typing.
- Produce images that you can fax with your PC's fax/modem.
- Produce images from transparencies or slides (with the right attachment).
- Create copies of a document (in concert with your printer).
The scanner shown in Figure 1 features seven one-touch buttons on its front. You can e-mail, copy, or even create PDFs from the original — or even run your OCR software with a single press of a button.
Specialized scanners are designed especially for things such as bar codes and business cards. An example is a digital, hand-held pen scanner (see Figure 2), with which you can re-create what you draw or write on special sheets of paper in the included notebook and a special type of self-adhesive notes. No more stuffing napkins with scribbles all over them into your jacket pocket after lunch! You can also use the pen scanner to enter appointments and To Do data into Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes and also flag information that should be automatically entered into an e-mail message when you connect the pen to your PC. (It uses a USB connection.)
Figure 2: A digital pen is a specialized scanner.
Different types of scanners
Over the past few years, different types of scanners have evolved for different jobs. Some types provide a better-quality scan, some take up less room, and some are designed especially for one type of original media. Take a moment for a scenic overview of what's available:
- Flatbed: Imagine the top of a copy machine. Cut off the rest of it, and you have a flatbed scanner. With a flatbed, you're likely to get the best resolution with the least distortion, and you can easily scan pages from a magazine or book.
- Sheet-fed: Limited space on your desk? A sheet-fed scanner may be the answer. The shortest models are about the size of a roll of aluminum foil, and other models look suspiciously like a fax machine. (As a matter of fact, a fax machine has a built-in scanner that it uses to create an image of the page.)
- Photo scanner: Many photo scanners are internal computer components, which means they fit inside your computer's case. Photo scanners are specially designed to read individual pictures taken with a film camera (or even small printed items, such as business cards or a driver's license).
- Hand-held scanners: These portable scanners come in different shapes and sizes, ranging from a hand-held model that can scan three or four inches at a time to a pen scanner that reads a single line of text. Hand-held scanners don't offer the picture quality and convenience of a flatbed scanner. They can fit in a laptop case (or even a pocket), though, so they have their place with certain road warriors. Barcode scanners are also typically hand-held.
- Negative scanners: The snobs of the scanner world, negative scanners are designed for only one purpose: to scan photographic slides and negatives. Although these scanners are usually hideously expensive, if the images you need are on slides or you want the best possible scan of a photographic negative, a negative scanner is the only way to produce a high-quality image.
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