Sheet fed scanners and some black and white scanners come with OCR software bundled in. Flat-bed and color scanners often come with image editing software. Many of the software packages are watered down versions of the full-blown commercial version of the software. Be sure that you understand the features of the included software before you upgrade to the full-blown commercial version. Many commercial software packages today have a plethora of available features.
Scan rate is the speed at which a page of paper is scanned.
Scan rates are usually set at pages per minute. or seconds per page. Scan rates can become very important when you are sitting and waiting for a document to scan or if you have many documents to scan, especially when you use the flat bed type of scanner for multiple documents. Just think of how boring and time wasting feeding on document at a time into a copy machine is and you will get the picture on scan rates. Another important feature to understand is the footprint, which is the size of the scanner and the room it will take up on your desk or computer furniture. Flatbed scanners have the largest footprint, but are often worth the space.