Business is not a black-and-white world. In fact, the best businesses are downright colorful! Research by David Wood Associates Inc., an electronic document and capture management consultant, found that market forces are pushing for widespread adoption of color documents. This is just some of the latest research supporting the benefits of color scanning and the significant impact it can have on your document management process by improving office productivity.

Despite the common myths perpetuated about color scanning, here are the truths about color scanning that you need to know:

• Business documents are not only black and white – Color is being used more and more frequently in offices around the world. The prevalence of color printers has shifted the balance, and businesses are increasingly using color in the forms and documents they create. And as more companies purchase color scanners, color will continue to become more common in business documents.
• Color scanning is not slow and methodical – Technological advances have vastly increased the speeds at which color documents can be scanned. Many scanners can process a color document just as quickly as they do black and white documents. Additionally, automatic color detection eliminates the need to separate color and black and white documents into separate batches and scan each independently.
• Large file sizes from scanning color documents do not make storing them fiscally unreasonable – The costs associated with data storage continue to fall, making storing these files more affordable than ever; and JPEG compression enables color files to be stored using much less space than you might imagine.
• Color scanning is not cost-prohibitive – Recent advancements and developments have made color scanners relatively inexpensive and agreeable to the budget of most organizations.

Color brightens up documents, enhances details, highlights areas of importance, and makes critical parts easier to read. Not to mention color just looks better than black and white in electronic documents, as color creates more visual information than bi-tonal scanning, making documents more readable, and as a result more valuable. With the myths about color scanning dispelled, isn’t time you got on board and added some color to your business?