Scanners (146 products)

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What to look for in a Scanner?

A scanner can improve workflow and help minimise paper usage. Here's what you need to know about scanners.

Scanner Size

Do you want your scanner positioned right alongside your desk set-up in arm's reach, or do you have enough room to carve out a scanner-sized corner? Scanners are available in a broad range of sizes. From on-the-go, portable scanners to large, standalone units. Even before you consider all of a scanner's spec, check its physical footprint.

Paper Size

As you probably could've guessed, the most common paper size a scanner maxes out at is A4. If you want to scan larger documents than A4, make sure a scanner explicitly states support for it. Conversely, ensure it can sort smaller document too.

Double-Sided & Duplex

Have you got a lot of double-sided documents? Rather than scanning one side - tediously flipping it over by hand - and scanning the other side, there's scanners which can scan both sides simultaneously. This effectively doubles the scanner's throughput, if not more. This feature is called 'double-sided' or 'duplex' scanning.

Scan Speed

A scanner's speed is rated using pages-per-minute (PPM). Faster scanners tend to cost more, so if you use a scanner infrequently, a high PPM scanner is an unnecessary purchase. However, if scanning's a daily occurrence, a high PPM scanner can cut down on wasted time.

Resolution

One of the main features you'll find listed under a scanner's spec-sheet is its 'resolution', measured in dots-per-inch (DPI). A higher DPI will produce cleaner, more legible scans. Basic office documents won't need a ridiculously high DPI, but finely detailed images and smaller text will benefit.

Network

When scanning a document, what's your preferred method from transferring the new digitised copy from the scanner to another device? Some scanners rely on physical media - USB drives and SD cards - but this adds and extra step to the process.

Fortunately, many scanners nowadays can connect wirelessly to your network for seamless, instantaneous transfers. E-mail a freshly scanned document right from a scanner's touch screen interface, drop it to your desktop PC or smartphone and have it sync-up with your cloud-based provider of choice.

Other Features

Is simply scanning a document enough, or are you wanting more features? An all-in-one printer may be a more suitable alternative for if space is limited and you need a universal device than can handle scanning, printing and more.

There's also scanners with 'optical character recognition', which can extract the text from a scanned document and convert it into an editable file format on your computer. Depending on your workload, this could save a considerable amount of time.

Flatbed Scanner Vs. Sheetfed Scanner

Ebuyer's two most popular categories of scanners are flatbed scanners and sheetfed scanners.

Flatbed Scanner

For home users, our comprehensive range of compact-sized flatbed scanners are a perfect solution for scanning just about any physical document into digital form, without taking up a massive amount of space.

Flatbed scanners - identifiable by their liftable lid - allows the scanning of all sorts of oddly shaped documents, not only a predetermined size of paper. Scan cut-outs from magazines, book pages, photographs and more with the adaptable interface of a flatbed scanner.

Back-up your scans to one of Ebuyer's many storage solutions - including hard drives, solid-state drives and more - and e-mail them to your friends and colleagues. A flatbed scanner's smaller size means it can comfortably sit alongside your desktop PC set-up, or tuck away nicely in a cupboard.

Sheetfed Scanner

For a power-users scanning reams' worth of paper of a regular basis - businesses and educational institution for instance - you'll need a sheetfed scanner, designed for efficiency and throughput to keep pace with the highest demands.

While a flatbed scanner's interface is adaptable, you have to painstakingly feed it one document at a time. In a busy environment, scanning a document one-by-one is unresourceful and a waste of everybody's time.

Capable of storing many pages at the same time, a sheetfed scanner is fast and productive. As the name implies, you can load up a sheetfed scanner with many documents - check a scanner's spec-sheet to see its capacity - and an automatic mechanism will feed it straight into the scanner.

This loading-and-feeding design - while fast - means a sheetfed scanner can only take certain sizes and weights of paper; A3, A4 and so on.

Leading Brands of Scanners

A well-functioning document scanner is an invaluable piece of equipment, from the occasional but time-sensitive scan at home, to sorting through hundreds of pages' worth of documents at work. Ebuyer's broad range of scanners are avaliable from the biggest names in the industry, including Fujitsu, Epson, Canon and more.

Scanners at Ebuyer

Whether you're buying a small form factor scanner for the home or an office, choose from Ebuyer's extensive selection and take advantage of our low prices and great deals.

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