THE best scanners have always been a useful item to have around your home.
But since lockdown, with more and more of us working from home, scanners have become essential for plenty of professionals.
If you're job still requires you to fill in paper forms, you've probably already discovered in lockdown that buying a good scanner is a necessity.
There's a couple of types of scanner that you'll likely be using in your home office: a flatbed scanner and a sheetfed scanner.
Flatbeds involve lying your documents on a sheet of glass individually, which can be a time consuming process, but generally these will produce higher quality scans.
Sheetfed scanners, sometimes called portable scanners, tend to be smaller and allow you to stack multiple documents to be fed through a static reader.
This is usually faster than a flatbed scanner, but produces lower quality reproductions.
Happily, there's also hybrid scanners which will have flatbed and a sheetfed functions.
If you want to know the quality of the scans you'll be getting from your device, take note of the DPI or Dots Per Inch.
A higher number means higher quality scans.
1. HP Colour Scanjet Pro 2500 f1
- HP Colour Scanjet Pro 2500 f1, £229.97 from Laptops Direct – buy here
The HP Colour Scanjet Pro doubles as both a flatbed scanner and a sheetfed scanner.
Up to 50 pages can be stacked in the sheet feeder (also called ADF) to be passed through the double-sided scanner below.
The feeder will manage 600 DPI and the flatbed will produce 1200 DPI scans.
Satisfied customers praise the HP's speed and the fact is scans both sides of a document on a single pass.
2. Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 Flatbed Scanner
- Canon CanoScan LiDE 300 Flatbed Scanner, £49.99 at Argos – buy here
The CanoScan flatbed scanner produces high quality images and is designed for both documents and for scanning photographs.
It's a lightweight device, weighing 1.7kg, but can scan at up to 2400 DPI.
Customers praise this scanner's value for money and the quality of its images.
3. Epson WorkForce DS-1660W Wi-Fi Scanner
- Epson WorkForce DS-1660W, £265 at Amazon – buy here
If you're looking for a hybrid sheetfed/flatbed scanner with Wi-Fi connectivity, look no further.
This Epson is chock full of features and will scan at 1200 DPI.
But unlike plenty of other scanners, you don't need to use a USB to attach this device to your PC, it'll do everything wirelessly, making it super convenient.
The only downside is that some customers say this device is a little bit awkward when connecting to Macs.
4. Kodak Alaris S2050
- Kodak Alaris S2050, £556.82 at Amazon – buy here
The Kodak Alaris S2050is definitely at the upper end of what you'd spend on a desktop scanner.
But plenty of satisfied customers think this model is worth the money, praising its easy integration with various devices and accounts.
The Alaris will automatically upload your documents to the account of your choosing and is designed to avoid paper jams as well as generally being hard-wearing.
5. Panasonic KV-S1027C
- Panasonic KV-S1027C, £984 at The Scanner Shop – buy here
A top-tier device, the KV-S1027C features good speed in both simplex and duplex scanning to image PDF.
It also has a 100-sheet automatic document feeder and can register up to a 100 programmable scan destinations.
The Panasonic KV-S1027C scanner is a USB 3.0 device designed for busy offices, and as such it also has a solid optical character recognition (OCR) reading of standard fonts.
Some reviews claim this scanner might have some troubles in the OCR reading of non-standard fonts, so just make sure the types of documents you need to scan use standard ones.
6. Visioneer Patriot H60
- Visioneer Patriot H60, £1,056.13 at OnBuy.com – buy here
The best and most expensive option in this list, the Visioneer Patriot H60 scanner is a real office monster.
This device has a daily duty cycle of 10,000 scans, which is a lot for a scanner in this price range.
The Visioneer Patriot H60 also boasts the best OCR performance we could find, and it's blazing-fast in scanning and saving in PDF too.
Add a complete software suite with hundreds of options to facilitate your scanning process, and you have one of the best scanners money can buy.
Do I need duplex scanning?
Duplexing is essentially the process of scanning both sides of a page at once.
Most advanced scanners have this feature nowadays, but this is something you should keep in mind if you often need to scan both sides of your documents.
The biggest technical difference in terms of duplexing is between scanners with one or two scan elements.
The former scans one page, turns the sheet (or letS you turn the sheet manually) and then scans the other.
Two-scan element devices, on the other hand, scan both pages at the same time, making the process faster and more efficient.
Understandably, scanners in this second category are also more expensive.
What resolution do I need?
For most documents, a 200-pixel-per-inch (ppi) resolution scan will be enough to give you a clear copy, but most scanners today supports 600ppi anyway, which is enough for photos too.
There may be exceptions to this rule, however.
For example, if you were to zoom in a photo to cut out a part of it, or to scan it at a higher resolution than the original.
You may also need a higher-resolution scanner if you want to print photos from negatives or 35mm slides.
What about software and drivers?
Most scanners come with embedded software and drivers, but you'll have to pay for some extra scanning software with some vendors.
Scanning software can perform a variety of tasks, from OCR to text indexing, creating searchable PDFs and business card management.
You should check out a scanner's software capabilities before purchasing one to make sure you won't have to pay extra for it later.
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