Go ahead, Google “types of scanners”, and see what you come up with. More likely than not, you’ll get mostly articles that talk about the physical types of machines, such as flatbed, sheetfed, portable, or drum scanners. Granted, often a machine type dictates which type of content it handles, but not always. Besides, some scanners are designed to capture and process two or three different types of content, such as, say, photos, slides, and documents, while others, regardless of the actual type of mechanism inside, are designed for processing only one type of content.
For our purposes here, let’s look at scanners from another point of view—suitability to content, task, or application, rather than mechanism type.
That said, here are the different scanner types by content:
- Photo scanners
- Document scanners
- All-purpose scanners
- Portable scanners
In other words, let’s take a look at scanners from the perspective of what they’re used for, instead of how you feed the originals to the scanner itself.
Read the entire article at About.com.