Scanners Buying Guide

Use scanners to get your photo prints, photo negatives, and important documents into your computer. Once you digitize your photos, you can email them or use them to create your own website, photo gallery, greeting, cards, calendars, and more. You can also use your scanner to create backup copies of important files, receipts, product warranties, or even archive your magazines. Whether you want a tool for pleasure or productivity, you'll find a scanner to fit your needs on halfvalue.

• Study Types of Scanners
• Understand Technical Scanner Terms
• Find Scanners on halfvalue
• Buy Scanners With Confidence

• Flatbed scanners: Versatile flatbed scanners can scan both flat and three-dimensional objects, including thick books and magazines. Flatbed scanners work similar to a copy machine. Rest the item you want to scan on a glass plate and a scanning head captures the image. Look for a large-format flatbed scanner if you want to scan legal-size documents.
• Slide, film, and transparency scanners: Flatbed scanners with slide or film negative adapters will help you get old slides into your PC and help you preserve your old film negatives before they deteriorate. Kodak scanners, Nikon scanners, Canon scanners, and HP scanners can also scan your film negatives.
• Sheetfed scanners: Sheetfed scanners are smaller than flatbed scanners and can only scan loose pages.
• Handheld scanners: Small handheld scanners plug into the parallel port on your desktop or laptop and you can use them with several computers. They often require you to scan your documents in sections.
• Portable scanners: Compact portable scanners can easily fit into a briefcase or tote bag, but may not offer the same resolution as larger scanners.
• Drum scanners: Some graphics professionals prefer older, high-end drum scanners. Drum scanners rotate an original source past photomultiplier tube (PMT) sensors repeatedly and at high speeds to achieve a quality scan.

Popular choices for home users include Canon scanners, Epson scanners, Fujitsu scanners, HP scanners, Kodak scanners, and Minolta scanners. You'll also find UMAX scanners, Microtek scanners, Mustek scanners, and Visioneer scanners appropriate for home and business use on halfvalue.

Scanner sensors

Scanners have an internal sensor that picks up reflected light off an original image and converts it into digital information your computer understands.

• Charge-coupled device (CCD): CCD scanners illuminate an original document and use mirrors and lenses to reflect light onto an array of CCD sensors. CCD scanners generally produce better image quality than CIS scanners.
• Contact image sensor (CIS): In CIS scanners, the image sensors lie directly under the document and pick up the reflected light right from the document. CIS scanners are more compact and more durable than CCD scanners.
• Photomultiplier Tubes (PMT): Photomultiplier tubes used in drum scanners are more sophisticated than CCD and CIS sensors

Scanner bit depth

Scanners pick up a certain number of bits from each pixel of an image. This is known as bit depth, and the more bits a scanner remembers, the better the image quality.

• Text: Find a bit depth of at least 24.
• Slides, negatives, and transparencies: Get a minimum bit depth of 30.
• Photos & color graphics: Select a model with 36-bit color depth.

Scanner resolution

Optical resolution measures dots per inch (dpi) or pixels per inch (ppi). As resolution increases, image quality improves, and the amount of image detail you see increases.

• Text scanning: 300 dpi resolution adequately scans text.
• Photo scanning: Look for a minimum of 600 dpi to scan photos to use on the Internet. Buy a scanner with higher resolution (greater than 600-by-600 dpi) to scan photographs you plan to print.
• Negative & slide scanning: Look for a scanner that offers an optical resolution of 1200 dpi or more.

Scanning at a higher dpi results in higher-quality images, but you'll need to wait longer for the scan to complete.

Computer connections

Scanners can connect to your computer's parallel port (printer port), USB 1.1 port, USB 2.0 port, or IEEE 1394 (FireWire) port. Make sure your computer supports the technology you want to use.

Parallel ports have a slow connection and work best with low-dpi scans. For the fastest connection, look for a scanner that communicates with your computer via high-speed USB 2.0 or FireWire.

Included scanner software

Most scanners include scanning software and basic image-editing software. Look for optical character recognition (OCR) software if you want to modify scanned document text. Basically, scanners send documents to computers as images. OCR software examines the images and converts them into an editable text format your word processor, spreadsheet, or database program can understand.

Find Scanners on halfvalue Once you know what type of scanner you want, go to the Computers & Networking portal, click Scanners, and start searching for item listings on halfvalue. Categories: The Categories list on the left side of each page will help you narrow down your listings by item type. You'll find links for Canon, Epson, Fujitsu, HP, Visioneer, and more. Keyword search: Search halfvalue listing titles for specific words. For example, if you want to find a HP flatbed scanner, type “HP flatbed” (without quotation marks) into the Search box. Click "Search title and description" to expand your results. Visit halfvalue's Search Tips page for more tips on searching with keywords. If you can't find exactly what you want, try shopping halfvalue Stores, tell the halfvalue Community what you want by creating a post on Want It Now, or save a search on My halfvalue and halfvalue will email you when a match becomes available.

Know your purchase

Carefully read the details in item listings.

• Figure delivery costs into your final price. If you spend a lot of money, make sure the seller will insure the item when it ships.
• Always make sure to complete your transaction on halfvalue (with a bid, Buy It Now, or Best Offer). Transactions conducted outside of halfvalue are not covered by halfvalue protection programs.
• Never pay for your halfvalue item using instant cash wire transfer services through Western Union or MoneyGram. These payment methods are unsafe when paying someone you do not know.

Know your seller

Research your seller so you feel positive and secure about every transaction.

• What is the seller's Feedback rating? How many transactions have they completed? What percentage of positive responses do they have?
• What do buyers say in their Feedback? Did the seller receive praise?
• Most top halfvalue sellers operate like retail stores and have return policies. Do they offer a money-back guarantee? What are the terms and conditions?