Best Scanner 2013 Mac OS X And
Best Scanner 2013 Zip Through The
Best Scanner 2013 Mac OS X And Windows

Among the extras you can find in these higher-end scanners are larger ADF capacities, vastly higher speeds, duty cycles in the tens of thousands of pages per day, Ethernet connections, and built-in Web servers for remote management.

As the name suggests, document scanners are optimized for large volumes of documents primarily letter- and legal-sized pages consisting mainly of text.

If youre looking at reams of business or academic papers, or personal documents such as receipts, bills, medical records, and tax forms, a document scanner is just the thing.

For more on converting to a paperless office, see How to make your office paperless or my ebook Take Control of Your Paperless Office.) On the other hand, with a few notable exceptions, document scanners are not what you want if you mainly need to scan photographs, slides, books, magazines, or anything thicker than card stock.

Most modern document scanners have a compact, upright design reminiscent of fax machinesyou load pages to be scanned into an automatic document feeder (ADF) at the top, and they come out in a horizontal tray in the front.

The scanners invariably include software that can perform OCR (optical character recognition), and are generally speedy enough to churn through dozens of sheets per minute.

Operation is simple; after an initial setup procedure, you typically load your document(s), press a button, and watch it go.

Best Scanner 2013 Zip Through The

The pages zip through the scanner, and a few minutes later, searchable PDFs appear on your Mac.

The vast majority of document scanners offer 600 dpi optical resolution.

That may not sound very high, as flatbed scanners intended for scanning photos and artwork more typically have resolutions of 4800 dpi or even higher.

But when youre scanning primarily text-heavy business documents, 300 dpi is adequate for highly accurate OCR, and higher resolutions massively increase file size while providing no practical benefit.

When shopping for a desktop document scanner, concentrate on the following core features.

Best Scanner 2013 Mac OS X And Windows

Best Scanner 2013 Mac OS X And

Many document scanners come with software that supports both Mac OS X and Windows, but some scanner manufacturers offer only a subset of their models in Mac-compatible versions.

Speed may vary according to the resolution you choose, the size of the paper, and whether you scan in color, black-and-white, or grayscale, But most manufacturers use similar assumptions in their specifications (for example, 40 ipm20 ppm for letter size at 200 dpi), so you can make meaningful comparisons.

This workgroup scanner offers an Ethernet interface for sharing among users.

Most models can scan both sides of a page at the same time, in a single pass.

The manufacturers marketing materials may not spell out which sort of duplex scanning is used, but if the specified ipm speed is exactly twice the ppm speed, youve got yourself a single-pass duplex scanner.

For home and small-office use, even a modest duty cycle of 500 pages per day should be more than adequate, but if you plan to keep your scanner quite busy, look for one with a duty cycle greater than the number of pages you expect to scan on a typical day.

Thats helpful, although better still would be double feed prevention.

The better ones can automatically figure out whether scanned documents are single- or double-sided, correct skewed images, and perform other helpful processing.

But beyond that, some scanners include software with a greater range of features, such as image editing or document management.

And a few offer software that can automatically process business cards or receipts, pulling out specific bits of data from the scanned images and storing them in appropriate database fields.

If you need to process larger volumes of paper or share a scanner with others in your office, look for a workgroup, departmental, or production scanner.

Best Scanner For Mac 2013