Image scanner
An image scanner is a cool device that helps you put pictures or text from the real world onto a computer. Think of it like a special camera that takes a super detailed photo of a document or picture. Once it's on the computer, this digital image can be edited, printed, or shared with friends.
Scanners work by taking light from an object, like a photo or a page from a book. Special parts inside the scanner, called a Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) or Contact Image Sensor (CIS), turn this light into a digital signal. This signal is then sent to your computer's memory. With special software, the digital signal becomes a picture file, like a JPEG or PNG. If you scan text, another program called OCR (Optical Character Recognition) can even turn it into editable text, like what you type in a document!
Types of Scanners
There are a few main types of scanners, each good for different things:
- Flatbed Scanners: These are the most common type. They look like a flat glass plate. You place your picture or document face down on the glass. A light and sensor move underneath the glass to capture the image. They are great for scanning single pages, photos, or even small objects.
- Hand Scanners: As the name suggests, you move these scanners by hand over the paper. They were popular in the 1990s because they were portable. However, it was sometimes hard to get a perfectly straight scan.
- Rotary Scanners (Drum Scanners): These are big, fast scanners used to scan many sheets of paper quickly. They are often used in offices or places that need to digitize lots of documents. The very first computer scanner was a type of drum scanner!
Images for kids
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A flatbed scanner. Documents or images are placed face-down beneath the cover (shown closed here).
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Pantelegraph -
Caselli's pantelegraph mechanism
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Belinograph BEP2V wirephoto machine by Edouard Bélin, 1930
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Scanner unit with CIS. A: assembled, B: disassembled; 1: housing, 2: light conductor, 3: lenses, 4: chip with two RGB-LEDs, 5: CIS
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DSLR camera and slide scanner
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A hand scanner with its interface module.
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Example of the Imaging Keyboard-Scanner
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A photographic print being scanned into a computer at the photo desk of the Detroit News in the early 1990s.
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Document scanner
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In South Korea, people visit 'Scan Rooms' to scan books themselves due to copyright laws.
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sceyeX document camera.
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See also
In Spanish: Escáner informático para niños
