Why do you need to scan?? ..............
Engineering and architectural departments with a lot of legacy paper drawings need to seriously considering transferring their paper drawings to an electronic format.
There are numerous reasons why this should be done, both for operational reasons and economic reasons. From the operations point of view, consider this. Your paper drawings are aging every day, and will eventually tear and wear out, and you stand a possibility of losing your intellectual data. Also, every time you need to view a drawing, you have to search through flat file cabinets to find the drawing you need, make a copy of the drawing, and then re-store it in the correct spot so future users can find it.
Now consider the same operation when all your paper drawings have been scanned, indexed, and copied to the server where everybody in the company can instantly access the drawings. If you need to check on a dimension or a detail, you pull up the drawing on your screen, and if you need to print a reference copy, you may do so on your inkjet plotter or on your printer. The savings in time, control and costs are tremendous.
Let's look at potential savings in operation costs. Consider an engineering office with approximately 5,000 legacy drawings, D- or E-size. In flat files, it would take up a room of 25' by 25'. Office space renting for $25.ft per year would mean that storage costs alone would amount to $15,625 per year. Assuming there are 10 requests per day for checking out and looking at old drawings, and it takes 10 minutes to find the drawing, make a copy and replace it, and clerical help in your office costs $25/hour, you will be spending 250 days * 10 requests * 10 minutes, or 417 hours per year on the manual searching and replacing master copies. That amounts to $10,415 a year. We are thus spending over $26,000 a year in a small office with 5,000 paper drawings in just handling and storing drawings.
Now consider the electronic alternative. Each drawing is scanned, indexed and stored. All 5,000 drawings would fit on a 10 gigabyte disc, a rather insignificant amount of storage by today's standards. It would take approximately 10 minutes to scan, index, store and put away a drawing. The total cost to convert the 5,000 legacy drawings would be 5000 * 10 minutes * $25/hr, or a capital expenditure of $20,833. Plus, you would need a wide body scanner. Vidar and Calcomp make excellent scanners for this purpose. Your total capital investment would be recouped in less than a year, plus you would have the benefit of having saved your drawings for posterity and enhanced your operations for instant drawing retrieval.