While scanners have been around for
awhile, they continue to evolve with new functionality that makes
them more and more likely to be a household item. Over time scanners
have become smaller yet have increased in functionality. In addition,
as with most electronics and computer items, scanner prices have come
down over the years making them affordable for most people.
If you have considered buying a scanner
but not quite sure of what you can use it for, here are a few ideas.
Scanning Photos For Printing
Photos are something nice to have, but
getting them from printed copy to the website so you can display them
for the world to see, is something else. Even though most people have
digital cameras today, most of us have older photos from our
childhood that we would like to have in digital form. Also, some
people, especially photographers, still rely on non-digital cameras
for expert-like quality images.
A scanner makes it easy to scan in all
your old photos and even negatives. Since they are digitized, your
software in the computer software can edit them, and create
interesting ideas from the results for uses in art projects or
scrapbooks.
Photo-Editing
This is another thing a scanner and
software can do for you. Use the edit feature in your software to
enlarge the picture on the screen and then print out just that
section. By doing the entire picture this way you can create
full-sized patterns to use as you wish. You could even take those out
to the shop and trace them on plywood for wood-shop projects or your
child’s next school project.
Copying Documents
A scanner can become a copying machine
by scanning all those receipts and other documents in to the computer
and then printing them out. Or you can just save the digitized
version of your documents and throw out all the paper. What also
makes this a nice thing to have is you can use software to improve
the images in case you got a grease smudge or something on one of
them.
Something else a scanner comes in handy
for is when you need one of Grandma’s recipes from her recipe book
or a page out of a magazine showing the instructions for project to
do at home. There might be some old documents that are related to
your family tree, and having a copy for yourself would be nice, a
scanner can get them into the computer for you, too.
Specialty Scanner
Did you know that you can buy a scanner
just for scanning receipts or business cards? Yes, you can purchase a
dedicated business card scanner to easily keep a record of business
cards. Or if you need to track receipts, you can buy a receipt
scanner just for that purpose.
OCR or Optical Character Recognition
You can use Optical Character
Recognition (OCR) software to convert pictures to readable text. Once
converted you can open them in a word processor and make whatever
changes you need. If you are working with a group event in the
neighborhood and someone hands you a printed copy you can change it
with the scanner and your computer. You can also scan sections of
books for quoting to share in emails. OCR software is usually
included with a scanner’s software bundle.
These are just a few ideas of how
having a scanner at home could be useful. There are a wide variety of
scanners available, some are better for documents and some are better
for photos. If you decide to buy a scanner for home, be sure you
understand your needs and the options available to you.
Learn more about scanners and there functions at http://www.thebestscanners.com
