Scanners are inexpensive but they do take up space on your desk as you need to open the cover to place or remove an object to scan. Also, you need excellent copies for scanning: no memos with coffee stains, fuzzy faxes, bad photos, etc.
Hardware:
I.1) Before you buy a scanner, decide what you want it for: all materials,
including text from most sources, photos, slides, negatives, filmstrips
-- or just one of these.
Flatbed scanners are multi-purpose: all can do both text and graphics
but not necessarily slides, negatives and filmstrips.
They do NOT do text in hard cover books.
I take too dark photocopies and hard cover books to a good copy shop
to get good photocopies of each page.
Alternately, for text in hard cover books you can buy a hand-held scanner,
needing a steady hand or a guiderail to use. This way, you need not break
the spine of the book and you do not miss the part of each line of text
which is near the spine and would be blacked out if you scanned the book
on a flatbed scanner.
To scan slides, negatives, filmstrips ONLY, you can buy a specialized
small scanner.
2) Many scanners work with both PCs and Macs but you must know what
operating system and ports you have.
3) Many scanners for PCs require Windows 98 SE (Second Edition).
4) You must also decide on the interface for PCs: your options are
a) parallel port (the scanner plugs into the port where you normally have
your printer; this is rather slow); b) USB port (on newer systems; easy
to connect and disconnect); c) SCSI (this is very fast, more expensive,
and you need to put a SCSI card into your system).
II. Brands I like and buy, based on tests in PC Magazine: HP, Epson,
Microtek, Umax.
The Professional packages I use/own/recommend:
1) OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software for TEXT: remember
that the scanner produces a digitized image and that the software needs
to translate the image into readable text. Do you have trouble deciphering
people's handwriting? Yes, so please have patience with the poor OCR software
that needs to differentiate between i,l,1,!, or g and q. The first few
pages you scan will be "training" sessions for the software; afterwards,
spellcheck your text in your favorite word processor and watch out for
possible problems especially with the letters shown above.
a. CAERE Omnipage Pro for many languages: select, e.g., US English
or Spanish or French; the software will use the corresponding dictionary
and recognize words
b. XEROX Textbridge Pro: this is excellent and very accurate for English
language texts.
2) Graphics software I own as it is most highly recommended:
A) Affordable packages (under $100), very good:
a. Ulead PhotoImpact -- search for this on the web and buy it online;
newer and less expensive than PaintShopPro and with more capability (about
$60)
b. Jasc PaintShopPro -- search for this on the web and buy it online:
comes with a manual (about $90)
B) Expensive packages, for heavy serious duty professional use, with
a steep learning curve, overkill for most of us:
c. CorelDraw -- judged to be the best package on the market
d. Adobe Photoshop -- popular especially among Mac users, sort of coasting
on its reputation.
Talk to someone in the bookstore about the academic/educational version
prices if you really need this.