Scanners directly follow illustration programs on the must-have scale. Consumer-level scanners come in three main flavors, and are used by specific types of people for specific tasks. Slide scanners digitize 35 mm film slides into images to be used in high-resolution print publishing. Page scanners digitize sheet-fed paper, and are perfect for optical character recognition applications (programs that translate printed text, as if by magic, into ASCII text files). But flat-bed scanners offer the most versatility by digitizing photographic prints, pages of printed text, and just about anything you might find wiggling in the gutter.

For images that will eventually be posted online, your consumer parameters are clear: Even the cheapest flat-bed offers color depths and resolutions that are overkill for Web design, and you'll definitely want to explore all the creative opportunities that flat-beds afford.

Pluses Some traditionalists will argue that scanners are more valuable than digital cameras for capturing real-life imagery: Not only can you scan prints that come from your film camera (thereby addressing your mobility needs), you can also can scan anything that fits within the boundaries of the scanner's image area. To this end, scanners give Webmasters an infinite variety of image sources.

So what are we really talking about here? Well, if you're the gamey typeand gamey's goodyour scanned inventory may include magazine ads, book jackets, baseball cards, flower petals, orange peels, sardine cans, your friend's ponytail, and body parts (attached, please) with memorable scars. Anything that can fit on your scanning bed is fair game. Three-dimensional objects produce surprisingly lifelike 3D scans, so by all means, have fun experimenting (just drape some dark cloth over the entire scanner if your 3D object prohibits you from closing the scanner hood). Many Webmasters also like scanning real-life textures for subtle Web page background images.
The bottom line: Creative scanning is an art in and of itself, and should be explored by people who lack true illustration skills.

Minuses The biggest problem with scanning "found art" is copyright infringement. Magazine ads tend to carry wonderful images of generic subject matter (the perfect "old man with bushy mustache," for instance), but chances are that someone owns each image, and might fight to protect it should your little caper be discovered. If you want to protect yourself from corporate lawyers, take one of three tacks.

First, you can get permission from the owner of the source material. Second, you can use the material under the "fair use" law, which lets you use copyrighted images for "purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research."(If it makes you feel any safer, you should know that we've never heard of any hobbyist Webmaster being sent up the river for posting a few innocently scanned images.) Third, manipulate your scanned image enough to both artistically and legally make it truly your own.

As far as technical drawbacks go, scans of printed images can sometimes pick up nasty moiré patterns when the line screen of your scanner conflicts with the line screen of the multi-colored dots that comprise your source material (this doesn't happen with continuous-tone film prints). Fortunately, most scanning software has an anti-moiréfeature, and moiré patterns can also be tweaked away in good image-editing apps, such as Photoshop.

Options All flat-bed scanners in the entry-level consumer category scan images at 24-bit color and resolution up to 300 x 600. While you'll likely be reducing your image files to as low as 3-bit color, some Web surfers have 24-bit color displays, and you may conceivably want to post files that accommodate these people. As far as resolution goes, scanning at 300 x 600 is fine for images that will be displayed on a computer monitor (as opposed to a glossy printed page). All in all, a flat-bed scanner is a rather simple beast that you'll be buying for a single task. As such, price becomes your main consideration.

The Agfa SnapScan (with a street price around $329) has a maximum scanning area of 8.5 inches by 11.7 inches.

The Microtek ScanMaker E3 (around $299) has a maximum scanning area of 8.5 inches by 13.5 inches.