Digital Scanners

Scanning artwork and photographs for reproduction is only one reason to use a digital scanner. Another important use is to enable computers to read printed documents. This process is called optical character recognition.

In optical character recognition, a black-and-white digital scan is first made of a document. Using various software programs, a computer is able to recognize this image as various letters and words. The text can then be edited in a word-processing program, just like text typed in by a person at a keyboard.

Because converting paper documents to digital format is very important to many businesses; some scanners have been made for this specific purpose. The primary technology is the same as for desktop scanners, but these special scanners use a mechanism that feeds pieces of paper one-by-one onto the scanning plate.