Choosing a Scanner

Being able to transfer your various documents and old photos to a digital format can make for much easier retrieval and storage. Especially if the documents are just on loan. Scanners are becoming a common piece of computer equipment and you might want to consider one. But for genealogy purposes, you have other things to keep in mind.

Resolution

Resolution refers to the number of tiny dots per inch that a scanner will record (dots per inch, also known as dpi). Average scanners are usually around 600x600 dpi, which is basically fine for most scanning. If you are only scanning photos so you can record your relatives likeness, that would be ok. If you think you might be scanning very old and discoloured photos, or faded documents, you will want all the resolution you can muster. There is one warning to this though. Hi-res images are pretty huge in terms of file size, and you will find your hard drive filling up quickly if you plan on doing a lot of scanning. So you can adjust the scanning resolution to only use the highest resolutions settings when necessary.

Size

There are scanners on the market specifically designed for scanning photos, and you may be tempted to get one of these especially if you are short on desk space. Be aware that you may be limiting yourself in your future research. You may only need one for photos now but you never know what kinds of documents you might come across later on. Also, photos do come in a variety of sizes. You could get frustrated with your small scanner when you have an enormous wedding family photo to scan.

Shape

When I say shape, I mean whether you should choose a flat-bed scanner or a more compact model that you feed the documents in through rollers (like a printer or fax machine). A feed-through scanner is limited to a certain size of document, and I've already mentioned how that can be a problem. But besides the size issue, these kinds of scanners aren't not good for use with delicate or fragile items. Some of them will bend your pages at quite an angle, and you could end up damaging old papers or photos. Another great feature of the flat-bed scanner is that you can even scan really large items, though it might take several scans to get the whole image.

So basically, for genealogy research I would personally recommend a flat-bed scanner with high resolution capabilities. Watch for a future article on how to best use your scanner in your genealogy research.

_{This article was originally published at Suite101.com}