Sheet scanner vs Flatbed scanner - Going paperless in my home (or nearly paperless)

[Sossity]

I have alot of documents, printed & handwritten, of/about my artwork, receipts, etc, that I would like to scan & reduce the amount of paper in my home.

I have a flatbed scanner, but just read that sheet or document scanners are a little more efficient when someone has alot of paper to scan.

Should I get a scanner for this? or just use my epson perferction 4490 flatbed scanner? if so on this type of scanner any models to look at? anything $250.00 & under would be preferred.

I have years worth of receipts, & printed out items, that are building up in drawers files, etc, & I dont know what to do with them, I read that one should keep their receipts indefinitely, but the print often fades on them very quickly.

I also have scraps of magazines, & books that keep around for art reference, as well as sketchbooks. This is one reason I am looking at drawing tablets, to digitize & reduce scanning of paper sketches.

The thought of trying to digitize all this is overwhelming, & I think I would end up doing it for the rest of my life when I just want to get on with my artistic endeavors. I have ended up just not writing as many things down, as I got tired of trying to track, digitize & document everything. I used to keep a written log of money; expenses etc, but the pages just build up, so I stopped writing things down, as I thought I would never have time to scan it all, especially now when I am doing school online. & now I do alot more of my shopping online, so I save my e-mail receipts I get from orders in folders in my yahoo e-mail.

but the paper takes space that I have very little of, & it would be nice to reduce the amount of drawers & file boxes I have for all my papers.

[lordsmurf]

I use an Iriscan portable/receipt scanner.
See the models at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&x=0&...reative=390957

The lowest-priced option is $110. (Mine was $75 refurbished from a Woot.com sale last year.)

Flatbeds take took long, and flatbed scanners err on the side of quality vs speed. A receipt doesn't need quality, it just needs to be readable for records purposes. So a portable scanner errs on the side of being fast.

The downside to a receipt scanner is that it costs the same as a higher-quality scanner. But you're paying for speed, portability, and ease of use. It comes with a soft leather pouch, and is about the size of two corndogs (on top of each other, not side-by-side). For that reason, I often take it with me on trips, just in case I need a scan of something. It does have a "high quality" mode, but it's nowhere near as good as a flatbed. I think of it as a receipt scanner, or with slightly a better mode for emergency on-the-road scanning needs.

I tried to be cheap and use my flatbed for scanning receipts, but quickly became disgusted with how slow it was.

Scanning receipts is a good idea, because the paper fades after about a year. (There's no "ink", it's thermal changes in paper itself that create the writing on a receipt. It lasts maybe 2 years max before it's so faint that it can't be read anymore. That's awful for anybody needing to keep tax records for the prescribed 7 years.)

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You can't avoid paper. Buy a file box and some folders from Walmart (cheaper than the office supply stores). Scan what you can, keep hard copies for recent and/or more urgent documents. I only scan something after it's more than 3 months old, excluding certain personal tax records (receipts groceries or going out to eat, for example).