Six Ways to Improve Your Scanning Results

Scanning can deliver some valuable benefits to your organization, but not if the resulting scans are poor quality. A botched scan is as useless as a paper document that’s been through the wash—and just about as readable.

Get It Right the First Time
The good news is, it doesn’t take much effort to make sure the text and images in your scanned documents are sharp and readable. Check out our tips for successful scanning the first time through, saving your company valuable time and money.

1. Check your results. It may seem too obvious to mention, but checking your scanned documents is a must. It’s much better to repeat the scanning process rather than share a document that no one can read. If the paper copy ends up in the shredder, you may have a serious situation that can’t be remedied.

2. Increase your default resolution. If your scanner is set to a default resolution of 200dpi, bump that up to a minimum of 300dpi. Your final file size will be larger, but the resulting documents will be much better quality.

3. Enable blank page detection. There’s no reason to save blank pages. Set your multifunction printer or scanner to detect and delete blank pages for a more concise document.

4. Enable color scanning. Be sure to take advantage of the feature if your device includes color scanning capabilities. Scanning a color document in black and white can result in images that contribute little or no value to the document’s content.

5. Enable two-sided scanning. Why waste time feeding a two-sided document through your device twice? Save time by defaulting to two-sided scanning.

6. Index as you scan. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capabilities make every document searchable for easy retrieval and sharing.