imaging technologies: cis and ccd

If you’re in the market for a new document scanner, you might be surprised by the huge variety of options available in the marketplace. Variety brings more products, but it also makes it harder to select the options and specifications that impact performance.

Image quality is one of the most important areas to consider, to ensure accurate information capture and better image fidelity. However, with so many scanners on the market — each leveraging various (and often proprietary) technologies — there seems to be a focus on individual system components. But the ability to meet your business scanner needs, and deliver the best image quality, relies more on the total systems package and how they interact, rather than any one component’s specifications.

What elements of a document scanner have the most influence on image quality?

First off, you want the best possible raw image to put into image processing. Which means imager type becomes a factor. There are several factors to consider when comparing these, and while Charge-Coupled Devices (CCDs) were traditionally the easy choice, the arguments putting them ahead of Contact Image Sensors (CIS) no longer hold up.

While it may have been an issue ten years ago or more, today, creating the optimum image quality for customers is no longer defined by the type of imager. Modern CIS technology has robust reliability and craftsmanship, scanning speed, signal-to-noise ratio, imaging uniformity, geometric accuracy, color fidelity and registration, and resolution capabilities. And with LED illumination replacing the fluorescent tubes of previous generations, resulting image quality is on par, if not ahead.

These advances in technologies, now available on scanners of all sizes and capacities, can provide the highest quality images, most reliable performance, and an overall better value to customers than ever before. Download the whitepaper to learn more about the different imaging technologies, and find out why you need to consider total system image quality when evaluating your next scanner purchase.