Nanotechnology For Dummies
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Scanners are interesting beasts — and man; you get a lot of bang for your scanner buck! In fact, a perfectly serviceable, relatively inexpensive USB scanner is waiting for you at your local Maze O’ Wires store, and it can do all this:

This scanner can bring all sorts of printed material to your PC monitor.
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, optical character recognition (OCR), 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).

Specialized scanners are designed especially for things such as bar codes and business cards. A unique example is a digital, hand-held pen scanner, with which you can re-create a drawing or writing on special sheets of paper in its notebook and a special type of self-adhesive notes.

A digital pen is a specialized scanner.
A digital pen is a specialized scanner.

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