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How Scanners Work

By: Jeff Tyson

Image Transfer

A scanner may have more than one way of connecting to your computer.

Scanning the document is only one part of the process. For the scanned image to be useful, it must be transferred to your computer. There are three common connections used by scanners:

  • Parallel - Connecting through the parallel port is the slowest transfer method available.
  • Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) - SCSI requires a special SCSI connection. Most SCSI scanners include a dedicated SCSI card to insert into your computer and connect the scanner to, but you can use a standard SCSI controller instead.
  • Universal Serial Bus (USB) - USB scanners combine good speed, ease of use and affordability in a single package.
  • FireWire - Usually found on higher-end scanners,FireWire connections are faster than USB and SCSI. FireWire is ideal for scanning high-resolution images.

On your computer, you need software, called a driver, that knows how to communicate with the scanner. Most scanners speak a common language, TWAIN. The TWAIN driver acts as an interpreter between any application that supports the TWAIN standard and the scanner. This means that the application does not need to know the specific details of the scanner in order to access it directly. For example, you can choose to acquire an image from the scanner from within Adobe Photoshop because Photoshop supports the TWAIN standard.

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In addition to the driver, most scanners come with other software. Typically, a scanning utility and some type of image editing application are included. A lot of scanners include OCR software. OCR allows you to scan in words from a document and convert them into computer-based text. It uses an averaging process to determine what the shape of a character is and match it to the correct letter or number.

The great thing about scanner technology today is that you can get exactly what you need. You can find a decent scanner with good software for less than $200, or get a fantastic scanner with incredible software for less than $1,000. It all depends on your needs and budget.

For more information on scanners and related topics, check out the links below.

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