What types of scanners are there?
The most common type of scanner, the kind you’re likely to find in your local computer store, is a flatbed scanner. It has a glass bed usually a bit bigger than Letter paper size (or A4 if you live in Europe! 🙂 and most of the common models are optimized for typical office correspondence. One of these may cost anything from under $100 to $400, depending on its features, or you can pick them up cheaper second-hand. You use this by placing the paper or book face-down flat onto the glass, and scanning from there. This is the kind of scanner most commonly used by PG volunteers. Some stores will call sheetfed scanners a different category. These are flatbed scanners with Automatic Document Feed (ADF), but they are fundamentally the same machine, and the ADF sheetfeeder unit may often be bought as an accessory to the flatbed scanner. Recently, a few sheetfed scanners have appeared that are very small, without a full flatbed, just a narrow strip that the paper rolls through. Avoid these for
