scanner : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1997-2008 Canadian Mind Products
Go to : punctuation 0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z (all)

scanner: A scanner is a device that can look at a page and turn it into an electronic picture, made of millions of dots. Most scanners can see colour, but others see only shades of gray. Most scanners are maddeningly slow, especially if you are trying to scan piles of text. A scanner typically scans at 300 DPI (dots per inch) or 600 DPI. The higher the resolution the more detailed the image. Some low-cost scanner manufacturers advertise bogus high resolutions such as 1200 DPI. They fake this with software that just fills in by averaging a scan done at 300 DPI. The 1200 DPI image actually has no additional detail, it just takes up 16 times as much RAM/disk space. For OCR (Optical Character Recognition) all you need is 300 DPI. With software such as Faxworks Pro, you can use your scanner as a FAX machine to send black and white images to people who have fax machines. You can use a scanner as a sort of colour FAX. You scan an image and enclose it with your Internet email. You can also use the scanner as a very slow copier, by scanning and then printing the image. If you have a colour printer, you can use it like a colour copier. Scanned images take up enormous amounts of room. You can very quickly fill up even the largest hard disk if you keep too many images on file. However, if the images are of printed text, after they have been converted to word processor format with OCR software, they are very compact.
OCR
resolution

	Please email your feedback for publication, errors, omissions, broken/redirected link reports and suggestions to improve this page to Roedy Green :
	Canadian Mind Products
	mindprod.com IP:[65.110.21.43]
	Your face IP:[38.103.63.18]	The information on this page is for non-military use only.
	You are visitor number 4,541.	Military use includes use by defence contractors.
	You can get a fresh copy of this page from:	or possibly from your local J: drive (Java virtual drive/Mindprod website mirror)
	http://mindprod.com/bgloss/scanner.html	J:\mindprod\bgloss\scanner.html