Picking the Right Flatbed Scanner for a Home Office

If you are like most people, whether at home or at work you are sitting at your desk amongst an array of paperwork, newspapers and other miscellaneous scraps of this and that; it's more then likely that these things are preventing you from doing any real work.

However, if you had a flatbed scanner you would be able to clean up all the paperwork that is cluttering up your space. With a minimal amount of effort you would be able to scan all those things and store the documents on your PC.

This is a reality because with optical character recognition or OCR software, scanners can convert printed documents into electronic ones that can be saved for editing as needed. Not only will it store documents but it will be able to import images on to your correspondence which will turn those boring yet drab documents into works or art from advertisements to presentations, Web pages as well as email messages for a beautiful marketing piece.

So why would you not want to buy a scanner, if it’s the price that concerns you most efficient scanners can run below $300.00 and still be able to give you the performance of a software bundle because over the years flatbed scanners have greatly improved.

With the help of many technical labs out there some very honest reviews of the flatbed scanners that are out in the market for home offices. If you are looking for speed, take a look at Kodak image it has 600 dpi and 300 dpi resolution. Scanners are tested for their color accuracy and by how well it will capture the standard colors of cyan, magenta and yellow.

Labs test for general color accuracy and resolution by using a professional photograph and then test it on the scanners to check the OCR capability. They will also scan a magazine article and a picture from that same article to see how well the flatbed scanner will produce screen images in magazines as well as newspapers.

Lastly, we spent some time using the bundled software, from OCR to fax capabilities, which came with each scanner for an accurate test of each package.

Flatbed scanners that are connected to a test bed PC such as a Gateway 266 MHz Pentium II desktop with a 32 MB of RAM and a 2MB hard drive via the parallel port prevents the need to install a SCSI card. Flatbed scanners with SCSI interfaces are somewhat faster, however the easier and most suitable installation with laptop compatibility of parallel scanners are much nice for a home office.

Compatibility with secondary devices are a major concern for flatbed scanners. Testing was done on an HP LaserJet6P printer to an Iomega Zip drive to check for any issues that may arise.

What was noticed was that the scanners would allow you to vary your resolution to suit your needs but only the Ulmax Astra 1220P and Microtek ScanMaker X6 models had the better capable control when it came to color depth of a scan. Meaning the direct size of the scanned document scanning level was limited to 1 bit black and white or grayscale or approximately 24 to 36 bit color. Basically what that means is your hard disk will quickly be clogged with scanned images. Many of the 600 dpi scans can eat up as much as 96 MB of your disk space. Just make sure that your computer can handle it.

Flatbed scanners can be a delicate piece of equipment and can be likely to receive damages. With the slightest bump you can send your new flatbed scanner to the garbage. With this in mind think before you purchase a flatbed scanner online rather then going to your local computer store.

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