OPTICAL SCANNING

OPTICAL SCANNING

Scanners employ photo-electronic devices to scan the characters being read. The reflected light patterns of the data are converted into electronic impulses that are, in turn, accepted as inputs to the computer system. It can convert a paper document directly into an input.
Following three types of scanners are common:

(1) Optical character recognition (OCR) equipment
It can read alphabetic, numeric and other special characters that are printed, typed or hand-written on ordinary paper. The most popular one is the scanner for score sheets of objective types of tests with multiple choices. These are used for compiling the entire examination results on computers. These are used extensively on:
 Credit card billing operations
 Processing of utility bills
 Accounting of insurance premiums
 Processing of airline tickets
 Accounting of cash register entries
 Sorting of mail automatically
 Computing test scores automatically
 Processing of a variety of forms in Government and business

(2) Graphic scanners
These scanners can read graphics, text, etc and are popular in Desktop publishing‟

(3) Hand-held optical scanners
These are used to read data on merchandise tags and other articles. They can scan a lot of data printed in bar codes and have revolutionized store receipt and issue operations, billing at check-out counters in malls, etc. Once bar coding becomes compulsory in India, these are going to become very commonplace devices in most retail stores.
However, readers must learn to distinguish scanners from magnetic ink character readers (MICR) used extensively in banks for reading cheques and deposit slips.