Friday 24 May 2013

It Is Never To Late To Learn How To Scan And Improve Computing Knowledge

By Carissa Glenn


It is a puzzling but true fact that people generally are capable of using all manner of modern electronic device but frequently never had the chance to learn how to scan. Here are some tips and suggestions designed to get newcomers to this field off to a better start.

New users should begin by familiarizing themselves with their equipment. This might be a purpose bought scanning device that only scans but more popular these days are the units that combine printing, copying and scanning altogether. Sometimes called multifunctional or MFD devices, they are common in both modern offices and private homes. Not mentioned here is the less used hand held scanner variety.

The majority of scanners have self instructional guides that explain the key steps and main features. Doing this is probably the best thing a new user can do. Despite how much one might dislike reading user manuals it will be time very well spent. These guides are normally packaged with the driver software, but if not, a web search will likely come up with something.

Now it is time to pick the appropriate formats for different images, selecting the resolution and deciding where to store images after scanning are the key steps of this stage. The PDF format standing for Portable Document Format is widely and successfully used for scanning documents. These are easily printed, attached to emails and sent to colleagues or friends, or simply as a means to archive important documents.

Documents do not require a high resolution to be viewed or printed and doing this tends to unnecessarily use up hard drive and network space. The density of ink or toner printed on paper and expressed in dots per inch or dpi is a rough and ready way to understand what the term resolution means. Most documents do not require a setting higher than 150dpi, however, for those with images or a diagram, increasing the resolution to 300dpi will yield better results.

Another use is scanning printed photographs. Here it is advisable to begin with a JPEG file format as these take less space and allow editing later. Named after the creators, the Joint Photographic Experts Group, the system involves compressing a complex color image file into manageable proportions. Higher resolutions may produce better images here, so begin at around 300 dpi and adjust up to 600 dpi for high quality results.

Beware that adjusting scanning resolution is not a cure all for improving image quality. Bad images will remain bad no matter what kind of setting is selected. Additionally remember that the larger the resolution the larger the resulting file size. Computers with older or slower processors will battle to handle very large resolution images.

Giving each image scan an individual name is important and the last bit of advice in this introduction. Saving each image or document with its own unique name will make them easily identifiable. Not doing this may result in the system, especially multifunctional devices, allocating their own random file names. This can be very frustrating because each file needs to opened to determine its contents.

The idea of this guide is to give inexperienced users enough basics knowledge to get going. Obviously there is much more to learn about using other file types and other techniques. Continuing to learn how to scan by acquiring more knowledge and experience can be very useful.




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