Scanning Your Options

You'll Love Digitizing Your Documents -- And It Won't Break The Bank

In this article: A crash course in scanners and a look at what's on the market.

Contrary to the predictions of futurists who envisioned that computing would lead to paperless offices, most of us still are drowning in documents made from dead trees.

There are the dreaded credit-card and utility bills, almost all of which arrive in hard-copy form; bank statements; new and old photographs taken with standard (as opposed to digital) cameras; that community newspaper article about your son's Little Leagure tournament exploits; award certificates earned by your daughter in ballet; recipes your mother has mailed; scattered notes on bits of paper.

Scanners are wonderful devices that can convert these documents and photos into digital form, and then let you store them on your computer's hard disk. They are easy to configure and operate. If you don't own one, it's time you do.

What Does A Scanner Do?

Essentially, a scanner takes a picture of a page or a photograph and then converts the image into a computer file. Inside sits an array of photosensitive silicon cells that measure the light from an original document, build a "map" of what they see, and then stores this map as binary (as in "1's" and "0's") computer digits.

I've Scanned My Document. What Do I Do Next?

If this is a photograph, you can see it and manipulate the picture with image-editing software. If it's a text file, such as a letter, you'll need Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software such as ScanSoft TextBridge Pro 9.0 to "translate it" into a document which you then can move over to a word processing file to store or edit.

Is My Computer Up To The Job?

If you're skating by with a computer that has only 32 megabytes (MB) of RAM memory and a one-gigabyte hard drive, it's time to upgrade.

Scanner vendors say you should have at least twice the memory of the size of the largest image you're trying to load. That translates to at least 64MB. RAM is cheap, so not to despair. A larger hard drive is important because saving scanned images as high-quality files takes up more room, sometimes more than 500KB. If you only have 50MB left on your one GB hard drive, it will max out pretty quick - just as you are starting to enjoy the benefits that scanning provides.

Finally, invest in a decent printer, such as a newer photo inkjet. You'll want a printer that can reproduce converted photographs into a file as close to the original as possible. Newer printers can handle more colors.

What Type of Scanner Should I Buy?

Sheet-fed scanners are faster for complex, multiple-document jobs, but for almost any other use, flatbed scanners are easiest to use. You've probably seen them in computer and office supply stores. They look like personal photocopiers; indeed, they can handle a lot of the same tasks. You simply lift the cover, place the document or photo face down on the screen, and use your scanner's software to scan and convert the document into a format your computer can read.

How Much Do Scanners Cost?