Before worrying about technical specs or reproduction abilities, your first consideration should be what type of scanner best suits your needs. Here is a brief rundown of the three major types of office scanners and the functions they serve. Flatbed The easiest way to understand how a flatbed scanner operates is to imagine the top of a copier sliced off its base. Essentially, a flatbed scanner consists of its own base, with a flat piece of glass and cover just as is found on most copiers. The scanning component of flatbeds runs over the length of the image in order to gather data.
Flatbeds are particularly useful when a user needs to scan more than single page documents.
Pages from a book, for example, can easily be scanned without having to copy each page individually first. If you plan on scanning objects you'll want to focus on flatbeds. By placing a white sheet of paper over a bouquet of flowers a scanner can reproduce what appears to be a stock photo onscreen. If you know that you won't be using your scanner for anything other than sheets of paper, a sheetfed scanner may be your best bet. Unlike flatbeds, the scanning component of sheetfeds is stationary while the document being scanned passes over it's 'eyes' - much like a fax machine.