Scanners use a combination of light and mirrors to bounce reflection of your document or photograph toward one or more sensors. Once you've digitized the material, you can edit it however you please. A flatbed scanner uses optics to convert a physical form into digital media. You'll also notice we upgraded the previous Canon Lide offering to the Canon Lide 400, which is almost identical to the 300, but has a little bit more speed and offers USB Type-C connectivity.Ī flatbed scanner is perfect for anyone who wants to preserve and back up printed photographs, or for offices that need to save or edit important documents. The HP Scanjet Enterprise Flow N9120, for example, can plow through up to 20,000 pages per day in its ADF, and then turn right around and render some of the finest archival work for pictures and paintings on the market. We also found that dedicated flatbeds often offered higher duty cycles than the average all-in-one printer, which is especially important for business use. The main reasons for this are that we already have a comprehensive list covering all-in-ones and that we feel anyone searching specifically for a flatbed is likely a photographer, artist, or archivist who wouldn't be able to do much with the inferior resolving power of the scanners often built into printers, especially when it comes to rendering colors accurately. Looking over the available flatbeds on the market, we made the executive decision not to include any all-in-one printers on this iteration of the list as we have in years past. Additionally, we included an HP model at a more wallet-friendly price point that still offers solid performance, particularly with document scans. We opted to remove the HP Digital Sender Flow 8500, as it felt a bit redundant with the HP Scanjet Enterprise Flow N9120, which offers superior overall performance in a comparable price range. Epson offers a range of price points, represented here, without compromising its vetted quality and performance, though for whatever reason, only their most expensive consumer model was previously included in our ranking.
While our list was previously dominated by more text document-friendly scanners, we added a few models from what is widely considered the foremost name in photo scanning and printing: the Epson Perfection V850 Pro, Epson Perfection V600 and Epson Perfection V39.