Technology wander, Scanners!

I spend a lot of time with scanners. More, I know most likely than I should.  It comes, for me, from the old days. I had a scanner that was attached to my Imagewriter printer. It was a print cartridge and used the printer to do the scanning. It took forever to scan anything. I spent a summer scanning images of dinosaurs both those created by my students but also ones we had permission to use in our “Dinosaur Application.” I use the quotes because it was a Hypercard stack, which was the precursor to what we call the internet.

At various times in the past, I have had some scanners in the house. I am down to three but one came with my printer. Scanners are like printers, some of them are very specialized. I do have a portable scanner that I have used for years. I am going to keep that one and a couple of other specialty scanners for a while. One is because it can scan a book. The other because it connects to a translation system and allows me to scan text, not in English. What I have learned about scanners are the same things I’ve learned about printers. Drivers and software make the difference when it comes to printers and scanners. If you need to scan pictures I highly recommend the Epson Perfection series scanners. If you are scanning documents, I highly recommend FineReader from AABBY.

The software is critical, one that makes a huge difference. Epson includes a wonderful scanning tool with their scanners called Epson Scan. In fact, I ended up buying an Epson document scanner to go with the perfection series scanner.  I got rid of the product shown in the picture (a scan snap) because that Epson software is so incredibly easy to use!