What the basic document imaging scanner does is capture the red-green-blue light information from a scanned document. This information is then saved by the scanner software in a standard graphic format file, such as a JPEG file.
Scanners are primarily business equipment and need to cater to business needs that are related to the above basic function. Hence they come in various configurations and with many add-on features and software.
Listed below are some standard features of scanners and how they tend to vary from scanner to scanner.
Other features include auto-crop and image endorsement. Auto-crop adjusts the image size to that of the original. All images would be the same size otherwise. Image endorsement stamps text or numbers on images.
Prices of scanners depend on the kinds of features that come with the scanner. At the time of this writing, desktop scanners come in the range of $300 to $3,000; departmental scanners are $1,500 to $7,000; and production-level scanners cost $15,000 to $75,000.
Scanners usually come with value-adding software such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition), forms processing, image-quality improvement facilities, etc.
Document-imaging scanners come with increasing numbers of features, capabilities, and add-on software. There are inexpensive desktop scanners for very small businesses, departmental scanners for larger departments, and production-level scanners that can handle very heavy scanning workload.
Scanners also come with varying capabilities such as the number of pages they can scan in a minute or day, the sizes of documents they can accommodate, the resolution of the images they produce, and so on.
Document-imaging scanners typically come with add-on software for character recognition and image-quality improvement.
