Scanners
For those wondering how to take their old photos digital, the answer is a scanner. If you want to share that picture of the good old days with friends and family, just scan it. You can send it then via email or post it in your photo gallery as you would with any ordinary digital picture.
A scanner will help you to take your traditionally printed picture collection to the digital world. Scanners serve to input both pictures and text into a computer. Scanners are similar to digital cameras, except scanners do not focus into infinity as digital cameras can.
Scanners are rated by the amount of dots per inch while digital cameras are rated by total pixels. A second noteworthy piece of information for scanners is the maximum bit depth of each pixel – thins indicates how many colors can be stored.
A flatbed scanner, the most common, looks like a photocopy machine, only the resulting image is stored in a file rather than printed on paper. Typically, it will be connected to the computer via the USB port, and it will be used to scan printed work. There are special feeders that will let you input a set of pictures without having to place every individual one into the scanner. Flatbed scanners are capable of turning a printed document into a computer text files… they can even deal with some musical scores. If you hear about sheet-fed scanners, know they are similar to flatbed scanners except the document is moved and the scan head is immobile.
There are hand held document scanners. These devices are dragged by hand across the surface of the image to be scanned. Their output goes beyond simple text. Modern hand-held scanners are able to reproduce objects electronically with a combination of full-color images with 3D models.
There are also drum scanners. Hand-held, flatbed or feed-in are the usual type of scanners found in a home office, while drum scanners are better found in professional venues.
Although rarely used now to scan prints since flatbed scanners are good and much cheaper, some type of drum scanners are used by the publishing industry to capture very detailed images such as images from film. Film can be easily mounted into the drum and the highly sensitive drum scanner can easily capture and reproduce the subtle details in the originals. Drum scanners can have resolutions in the order of the ten thousands dpi and are the recommended tool if the intention is to enlarge the pictures later.
Scanners usually come with proprietary software to allow resizing and otherwise modifying a captured image. Many other types software able to work with images – either general o specifically image-oriented – can also perform the task.
Scanners will become an essential part of your home computer set-up, since not everything in this world has been yet turn digital, and they can deal equally with images and documents.
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If you have a prints that you would like to have in digital form, you can scan them yourself or ask for help at any professional high street photo shop. They may be able to scan them and transfer them to a DVD or CD-ROM for you.
When it comes to film (slides/negs/transparencies) a drum scanner is the only choice when you want to capture every bit of the original detail.
Often the results can be surprisingly superior, in terms of color and detail, to even very expensive DSLR digital camera shots.