If you are buying a scanner for home or small business use, then a daily duty cycle of 500 pages will be enough for you.Įach scanner needs some software that allows you to adjust such parameters as format, place of storing, etc. Then you should opt for a model that can scan more pages. When choosing the best desktop scanner, you need to count approximately how many sheets of paper you will process per day. The duty cycle shows an optimal number of pages the device can scan a day.

If saving time is important to you or you will be working with two-sided documents very often, then you should look for a scanner that supports duplex scanning.

There are two types of scanning, simplex (the device works with only one side of the document at a time) and duplex (both sides are scanned at once). You can find the information on both measures in the specs of most desktop scanners for business or home use. Scanning mode (grayscale, black and white, or color), paper size and resolution influence the scanning speed.

An “image” means one side of a document, and a “page” stands for one sheet of paper. Typically, the scan rate is shown in the number of pages or images per minute (PPM and IPM, respectively).

Wireless scanners for computers