What To Look For When Purchasing Color Scanners

If you ever owned a color scanner in the 1990s, you probably remember them being bulky and annoying. They took up tons of space and really didn’t offer you anything but the basics. In order for you to utilize them you had to open up the top, place the paper on the glass plate, hope it was positioned properly, close the lid, and then just wait to see what happens. Sometimes it wouldn’t work out the way you wanted, which meant you just wasted the last 3-5 minutes. Then of course you had to turn the paper over if you needed the other side scanned.

The next step in scanner evolution was the all in one unit. While this still took up a large amount of space, there were many advantages. You could scan items, copy, as well as fax this information wherever you wanted. This one unit could also be used as a copy machine, to copy information one the unit itself, or from files down loaded on your computer, etc. Then it also had fax capabilities, making it possible to send and receive faxes. All of these components combined helped to reduce the amount of time you spent operating the machine, as well as combining three needed office machines into one unit. However these too have their drawbacks, since you still had to feed the machine one item at a time, some of the controls were complicated, and the machine didn’t always work properly.

Today there are new technologies that have improved color scanners dramatically, just take a look at Fujitsu Scansnap S1500. One is their size. Sizes have become smaller as the electronics have gotten better, and now you can find these scanners that take up about as much room as a toaster. This doesn’t mean that they are not high quality though. Now they have a feeder at the top end of them, and are able to feed up to fifty different items into it at one time. They are also fast, with some models able to scan more than twenty pages a minute. With back to back scanning, both sides of a document can be scanned at one time, saving a lot of time and headaches.

If you take a closer look you will see that new scanners are also able to measure the sizes of the documents themselves. So instead of you wondering if the paper is in properly, these scanners do all the work for you. A few examples of these are receipts, letters, forms, or even spread sheets. Even if it’s double-sided it won’t matter. A good example of a scanner like this is the Scansnap S1500.

There are so many different companies selling color scanners that the choices can often be confusing. However, there are tools on the internet to help you get through the clutter and pick the scanner that is going to work best for you. The first thing you need to think about is what you want the scanner to be able to do, and any extra features like speed, amount of documents it can process in one run, whether it can scan directly from paper to file, such Fujitsu S1500, or create PDF documents automatically. Then there is of course your budget. Many quality home office scanners have a lot of capabilities, and are offered for around a hundred dollars.

You can save time looking for the right color scanner by utilizing comparison websites. These will allow you to look over several scanners at the same time based on the criteria you have in place. Once you have the best options in front of you there will be prices you can compare as well. So you end up finding the cheapest price for everything you need. Once you find the best option you can click on the link and go directly to their website to make a purchase.