Читать книгу Collins Complete Photography Manual - Collins Dictionaries - Страница 63

Most scanners are of the ‘flatbed’ variety. You lay the item you want to scan face-down on a glass plate, close the lid and then operate the scanner from your computer. The glass plate, or ‘platen’, is usually a little larger than an A4 sheet or US letter size. Larger A3 scanners are available, but they are specialist items and considerably more expensive.

Flatbed scanners are designed for all kinds of printed material. They can be used to scan articles in magazines, letters and business documents as well as photographs. However, there is some quality loss during the scanning process, however good the scanner, and photo prints themselves are often imperfect, so it is better, where possible, to scan the original negative rather than a print.

Flatbed scanners with transparency adaptors can do this, but the quality will not be as high as you will get from a dedicated film scanner. These are more expensive than standard flatbed scanners and can only scan 35mm slides and negatives. You can also buy medium-format film scanners, but these are many times more expensive and are impractical for amateur photographers.