What Features To Look For In Handheld Scanners?
- Filed under Scanners + Technology
If you are thinking about purchasing a handheld document scanner, there are some features that you might want to look for. All of the scanners aren’t built with the same type of customers in mind, so depending on what you need, you should buy a scanner that fits your use the best. Some might want a very compact scanner that can even fit in the pocket of their jacket, but for some professionals or even consumers it would be enough to fit them in the side pocket of their laptop carry case.
If you want to get a really high quality image scanner, you should look for a good DPI number. This stands for Dots Per Inch, and it means that the better resolution you will get for your images. By getting more details, you will get a sharper image and you will be able to even digitize photos with good results. There are some handheld photo scanners out there that are able to make pretty good photos, and for someone who needs to scan identification cards, passports or something similar, it might be a good idea to use a scanner like this.
Most handheld scanners come in a wand form, and they differ in size. If you want to be scanning documents, you might want to get a scanner that is the full width of an A4 paper. That way you will only have to swipe once over the document to get a full scan. With a smaller scanner you would have to do multiple swipes and his could distort the image to some extent.
Documents don’t generally need such a good resolution as the photo scanners as you can get quite good images of text documents without a very large resolution. If you need to scan documents with photos, you might want to consider a high resolution model. For this purpose it is usually needed to go with a USB powered scanner as it can take quite a bit of power and memory to scan high resolution images.
These swiping scanners usually work with a motion recognition chip that detects the motion of the swipe, and creates the image based on this. Some of them have a set of rolls that you have to press against the document you are scanning, and they will calculate the motion based on the speed and direction at which these rolls are rolling to. This kind of document scanners might be cheaper to get.