How Do Hand-Held Scanners Work?

Basics

Hand-held scanners work on the same principals that other scanners work and were an earlier form of scanning device. Because the human hand is not as steady as a motorized conveyance, scanning images with a hand-held scanner doesn't generally produce as good results on images, but generally works well for scanning text.

How It Works

A hand-held scanner has a light source inside to illuminate the image or text to be scanned. You put the image or text on a flat surface, preferably taping it down to keep it steady and flat. You then take the scanner, press it flat on the image and slowly move it across the surface. This will send the image capture to the computer.

Conversion

The hand-held scanner must be attached to a computer and have appropriate software to translate the scanned image into a usable digital format. For images, this generally can be done with Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or the software that comes with the scanner. For text, an optical character recognition (OCR) software package, such as OmniPage is needed. OCR software captures the image from the hand-held scanner then "reads" it to convert it into editable text.