Digital photos from your digital camera are easy. But what about those old photos taken before digital cameras were invented?

Flatbed Scanners

It may be that you have a lot of old photos that were taken before digital cameras were even invented. If so it is still possible to make these prints into digital photos . All that is really necessary is a flatbed scanner. With this flatbed scanner you can take your prints and make them into digital photographs. Once you have a digital photograph, you can edit it just like any other digital photo and output the edited photo as a print. These scanners also work great for children’s artwork and school papers. You can turn these precious memories into digital images that you can save forever.

Most flatbed scanners also come with optical character recognition (ocr) software that lets you convert pages of typed text into word processing files.

The key to selecting a flatbed scanner is its resolution, measured in dots per inch (dpi). The higher the resolution the better the image and the higher the cost of the scanner.

Today scanners are very inexpensive and quite handy; therefore, I recommend that you purchase one if you have any plans to either scan photographs or other kinds of work. It is easy to get a very good flatbed scanner for under $100.

Sheet Fed Scanners

Sheet fed scanners can automatically scan a stack of documents. But it is unlikely they will scan a photo. They are often part of a combination fax/scanner/printer. I don’t recommend this type of scanner for photo scanning.

Film Scanners

Film scanners will scan the negatives that came with your prints when you had your film processed. These scanners can produce very high quality images that you can then edit on your computer. However, film scanners are also more expensive. You can expect to pay at least $400 and probably in the range of $700 to get a very good one.