document scanner

An optical scanner geared to office documents rather than photographs. Also called "office scanners," "enterprise scanners" and "business scanners," desktop models have automatic document feeders that can scan in the range of approximately 15 to 100 pages per minute. Such units are rated in pages per minute (ppm) or impressions per minute (ipm) if both sides of the page are scanned simultaneously. "Personal document scanners" are low-speed, portable models that accept one sheet of paper at a time.

Images or Text
The output of document scanners may remain as images within a document management system, but many applications require that the characters on the pages be converted into ASCII text for manipulation in word processing and other programs. Most document scanners come bundled with optical character recognition (OCR) software for the computer that provides the conversion from visual character images to ASCII text. See scanner, ASCII and OCR.

Enterprise Scanner

Designed for transcribing volumes of paper documents to computer text, enterprise scanners have high-capacity document feeders.

Portable Scanner

Personal document scanners are very portable, but work with one sheet of paper at a time and are not designed for high speed.