Tuesday, 8 February 2011

Printers, Photocopiers and scanners

I have noticed a rather surprising misconception amongst many folk...
Several clients have thought they were scanning things when they are actually only photocopying.
There seems to be quite a lot of confusion about this, so I thought it worthy of a mention on the blog.
Just to clarify things...

A photocopy is simply a paper copy of something you want to duplicate. This can be done in black and white or colour (if your printer has a colour ink cartridge!)
A photocopy doesn't need your computer to be turned on and your printer doesn't even need to be connected to the computer to do this.

Printing needs a computer connection and the computer must be turned on. The printer must also have been "introduced" to the computer so they know and recognise one another. Once this has been done you can print out emails, letters or other documents and pages from the internet as well as photos.

Scanning is really printing in reverse....You can copy photos and documents onto your computer by placing them on the glass plate of the printer/scanner face down and closing the lid.
It can be a good idea to scan in your important documents so that you have a computer copy of them should you ever lose them. You can also scan in old and precious photographs and store them on your computer.
You have to tell your computer where to save the scans and you need to give them a name too.

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