Or perhaps you are interested in a scanner that will allow you to perform various faxing or copying functions. Dependent on your needs, certain models may be more attractive based on their features and specifications. It is important to understand those features and specifications clearly to help you make the best purchasing decision. The resolution specification is the first specification that most people are interested in, however it is also one of the most misunderstood specifications. There are other terms such as optical resolution and interpolated resolution that should be addressed.
Interpolated resolution is added resolution that is created by the software of the scanner itself.
Basically, a 300 dpi image can be further broken apart as additional dots are added. These additional dots take the averages of the nearest pixels to selectively determine the proper color values. Interpolation can have a softening or smoothing effect, but will also increase the physical file size of the image dramatically. When shopping for a scanner, the important figure is the scanner's optical resolution. Another issue of course is to understand how much resolution to use for each application.