With the ever-increasing craze for photos and pictures, the scanner is emerging as an important utility for the computers.

The computer users are developing a fancy for the scanners. The uploading of photos to image galleries, sharing them with the family members have brought a change in the mindset of people. People are looking for scanners and are following the same way as in the selection of other sophisticated technologies. This feature will help you to know the must of scanners to make a quality purchase. Before buying a scanner the points to consider are:

While you are making a scanner purchase, the most important aspect to look at is the Bit depth. To read every image or pixel of an image the scanner stores some bit in its memory. This bit storage is called as the Bit Depth. The higher will be the bit depth, the more will be the clarity of images scanned. It is advisable that you look for the scanners having 24 or more bit depth.

The second aspect to take care is the speed. The speed mainly depends on the scanning resolution. Higher is the scanning resolution, the longer you will have to wait. The parallel ports scanners are typically slow but the USB scanners that connect to your PC via USB port are costlier. SCSI card scanners are the fastest and most expensive also.

While you are looking for the scanners that are faster and cost effective also you must take acre of which US port your computer is using to. The scanners in the market make use of USB 2.0 and if you are using these on old computers, you really need to update your PC.

The next aspect to take care of is the Optical Resolution. Resolution is the dots per inch. The higher will be the resolution; more will be the clear scanned image. The resolution of 300 dpi is advisable for the common users but for the graphic users 600dpi is highly recommended. To scan the slides or transparencies you will need an optical resolution of 1200dpi.

While making a scanner purchase, you are also making a purchase of software. Always look at your requirements and check whether you are having the right set of software bundled with your scanner. For instance to edit the scanned document you will need an Optical Character Recognition Software (OCR). If required update your software to match your requirements.

These tips can surely help you to make a profitable and intelligent purchase.

Renu singh