Wide Format Imaging

As a wide-format printing professional, it's important to have quick and easy scanning capabilities at your fingertips. A quality wide-format scanner can streamline your business operations and ensure that valuable documents are reproduced clearly, and accessed and shared easily. With that in mind, it's vital that you look beyond the list price and get the best value for your investment by carefully assessing the most important features of the scanners on the market and aligning them with your needs.

First, figure out what size paper you will be scanning. Wide-format scanners range in size from 25 inches to 54 inches, but you don't always have to match the scanner size with your paper size. A scanner with image rotation technology can save you money by allowing you to buy a smaller scanner and simply feed your documents lengthwise. Prior to scanning, you can program the scanner to rotate the image 90, 180, or 270 degrees so you and others can view it right side up.

Next, determine whether you will need to scan in black and white or color. Even if all your original documents are black and white, color scanning capabilities can come in handy if you need to pass along color notations or edits on a document. Evaluate the needs of your client pool now and in the future to determine if you will need color scanning.

Value Efficiency

Productivity is the essence of any industry. Because you want your wide-format scanner to be an asset to your company's business, seek out a scanner with features that will save you time.

A scanner that connects directly to the company network, for example, can promote productivity because all employees who need to use the scanner can access it easily from their workstations. With a network scanner, users can send files directly from the scanner to an FTP server, email, a USB stick or a folder on the network. Additionally, a network scanner won't require you to load drivers or software onto a dedicated computer.

Automatic width detection—which allows users to simply feed the document into the scanner without having to do any time-consuming preprogramming— also can increase productivity. This feature saves time by eliminating the need to input page dimensions each time you scan a document.

Time spent waiting for a scanner's fluorescent lights to warm can add up, so a scanner with LED lights can be a timesaver. LED lights are resistant to changes in ambient temperature, which means your scanner is ready to work the moment it's turned on.