Scanners get cheap: paying more for a scanner doesn't always get you more.(Buyers Guide)

Electronic images seem to be everywhere. Family and friends swap them across the world. Every kind of web page has them. And legions of devoted home photographers edit their images on personal computers so they can print custom photos on high-resolution color inkjets. Many of the images making their way into home computers have been captured by a digital camera or camcorder, or digitized by the photo processor when the film was developed and delivered on a CD or via the web. (For details on ways to digitize your snapshots, see last November's report, "Digital Photos.")

But if you do more than a modest amount of film photography, having a processor digitize your photos, at $5 to $10 per roll, can become expensive quickly. A more cost-effective way to digitize a few photographs is with a flatbed scanner, which can capture the image of nearly anything you place on its glass surface, even those old photos you've tucked away in a family album or shoebox. Since you can scan virtually anything that lies flat, a flatbed also makes possible such 21st-century wonders as e-mailing Grandma a copy of your kindergartner's latest masterpiece. Scanners also include optical character recognition (OCR) software that can convert words on a printed page into a word-processing file in your computer.

Flatbeds aren't the only type of scanner you may see in stores. Sheetfed models can automatically scan a stack of loose pages, but they sometimes damage pages that pass through their innards. And they can't scan anything much thicker than a sheet of paper, including bound publications such as books or magazines. There are also multifunction models, which save space by combining a scanner, printer, and often a fax modem. Serious photographers may want a film-only scanner that scans directly from an original slide or negative.

For most home needs, however, flatbed models like the ones we tested offer the best combination of versatility, performance, and price. Some stores may throw in a scanner for free, or for a few dollars extra, when you buy a computer. But considering how inexpensive scanners have become, there's little need to put off buying one if you think it would be useful.

Popular flatbeds fall into two categories: Models priced at about $100 typically offer an optical resolution--the level of detail they can actually scan--of 600 dots per inch (dpi). Models priced at about $200 offer 1,200 dpi optical. Our tests of eleven 600-dpi models and seven 1,200-dpi models show that while flatbed scanners do differ significantly in accuracy when scanning color photographs, those with 1,200-dpi resolution don't necessarily produce better results. In fact, for scanning photographs, 300 dpi is generally sufficient.

GETTING THE PICTURE

All flatbed scanners work basically the same way. Sensors pass beneath a plate of glass on which the document lies and convert light reflected from the original into an electronic signal, which is then digitized and sent to the computer.