Before you can cut, drop, colorize, resize, rotate, and collate pictures with a personal computer, you need a way to get them onto a hard disk. You have many options, from digital cameras to video frame grabbers, but by far the cheapest image-capture device is a scanner.
             There are three types of scanners available on store shelves; there is a flatbed, a sheet fed, and a photo scanner. This paper will discuss flatbed scanners because they are the most versatile type of scanners; with the flatbed, a person can scan pictures and pages from books and magazines in addition to photographs and other graphics (McNamara 40).
             A flatbed scanner has many uses. It can turn shoe boxes full of photos into a digital photo gallery; it can create a family or business website complete with photo and graphics; it can scan your paper documents and use OCR to convert them to files that you can edit with a word processor; it can give you occasional copies without investing in a photocopier; and a flatbed scanner can surprise grandparents with photos of the kids via e-mail (The PC Technology Guide 1).
             One source noted, “On the simplest level, a scanner is a device which converts light (which we see when we look at something into 0s and 1s a computer-readable format). In other word, scanners convert analogue into digital data.” (The PC Technology Guide 1). When scanning an image, the image is placed on the carriage, consisting of a light source and sensor. All scanners work on this concept of reflectance or transmission. Scanners now have cold-cathode bulbs; they once used florescent bulbs; the florescent bulbs rarely could emit enough light for an adequate amount of time and while running they emit heat which can distort the image; on the other hand cold-cathode bulbs do well; they produce a bright white light with little heat (The PC Technology Guide 2).
             To direct the light from the bulb to the sensors that read ...