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:
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.
