Things you should know about scanners?

There are various type of scanners, flatbed scanners, colour scanners, high speed scanners etc. while you need to identify the right scanner type to use in your application also you need to identify the right scanner supplier for the selected features.

there are three major areas scanners are being used graphic editing, document management and for large format documents.

Graphic editing environments scan photos, documents for reproduction, good examples are news papers, graphic houses etc. all smaller scanners we use at home also designed to do this kind of image scanning of photos. The common feature of these type of scanners are they are not fast but produce very high quality colour images (not in the case of smaller home scanners) and most of these scanners comes with a flat bed only, because these kind of scanning do not require automatic feeders as they are not meant to handle large volumes. but some times you will find some scanner manufacturers offer similar features.

Documents scanners are on the other hand designed to handle large volume of papers, comes with a auto feeder, but generally these scanners are scanning in black and white but in the future we expect this to change. The major challenge with manufactures of document scanners are the facts that documents can be double sided, small as business cards or big as A3 and printed in thick paper, some times printed in very thin paper etc,. Generally found in these files are staples or pins. Also files contain different size, different thickness papers together. This makes the scanners to be able to handle unsorted multiple paper types and it becomes a very difficult task to stop multi-feed ( scanner sucking more than one paper ) due to varying thicknesses and sizes. Further complicating case is different color documents need to be captured in same good quality for future reading.

So different scanner manufacturers try to specialize in niche areas so they can place their scanner in that niche market. Some are very fast but handle only one paper type, some scanners handle different paper sizes but lack some other features etc. This makes you to have a very difficult time in selecting right scanner for your job. According to our surveys we have found there are more than 380 scanner models for document scanning and the prices of these scanners can vary from few hundred dollars to as high and few hundred thousand dollars.

The final type of scanners are the large format scanners which are again a very specific market to handle large size documents, generally from A2 to A0 size engineering drawings.

There are also other type of scanners such as X-RAY film scanners, and Map scanners etc, which I have not discussed as those can be clearly identified and will not confuse the user.

Summary
If you are planning to scan your documents, you should identify the right scanner for the job, failing you will have problem with your scanner delivering goals. Also note home scanners are not fit for this kind of work and you need to have a proper document scanner.

Also you should know scanners are electromechanical devices, therefore require regular maintenance, make sure you maintain your scanner by cleaning your rollers and glass guides etc to keep optimum performance. If you are not experienced with the scanner do not open it, there are lot of precision optics inside, changing position of any one of these can make your scanner useless. If you have image quality problems and you have done the normal cleaning of the scanner and it has not improved the quality talk to a competent service person.

have a good luck with your scanning project.