Around the heyday of the Model T 80 years ago, this column might have started out, "Buggy whips have never been more versatile or useful than they are now." And the parallel today might be, "Document and business-card scanners remain a valuable and increasingly affordable tool for business and personal productivity."

So let's say it: Scanning lives and even thrives, despite the proliferation of e-mail for communication. Hardware prices are coming down and scanning software has gotten smarter. Odds are that that blue-ink-on-yellow-paper invoice you never could scan properly two years ago now scans perfectly on the first pass. And it's likely stored in an open format that will be with us a century from now: the PDF.

The biggest change for the better has been the availability of Kofax VRS (VirtualReScan) software in affordable—now sub-$500 —document and personal scanners, despite the software's costing $500-plus were you to buy it alone. VRS figures out the best way to knock out colored and gray-shaded backgrounds while increasing the legibility of text and writing even when it's not black ink on the original. Think of VRS as an add-on to other scanning software, not a replacement.

The most impressive scanner I've worked with lately is the Xerox DocuMate 252, about $980 street. It uses Scansoft PaperPort for scanning and file management, plus Scansoft TextBridge for optical character recognition, and Kofax VRS for tough-situations scanning. As with nearly all document scanners costing more than $500 these days, it has two CCD scan heads so it can read both sides of a document at once (and discard blank back sides if desired). It scans 25 sheets or 50 sides a minute. By year's end you may see auto-duplex scanners for well under $500.

Visioneer recently released a VRS-enabled version of its Visioneer Strobe XP 200, a sheet-fed (one sheet at a time by hand) scanner for $400 street, $100 more than the non-VRS version. Current Strobe XP 200 owners can upgrade to the VRS software for the $100 price difference—a reasonable price for all the time you'll save.

Scanning hardware and software remain cantankerous. PaperPort software, even in its ninth version, still has quirks. So does VRS. For instance, on the DocuMate 252 I could create a front-panel preset to scan in 300 dpi with a filter to remove a red background, but it resisted my best efforts to implement the blue- and green-background filters at 300 dpi monochrome. The auto-crop button—useful when you're scanning a receipt—remained grayed out; it turns out that it hasn't actually been implemented yet.

For scanners with automatic document feeders (ADF), you need to pull out staples and paper clips (obviously), riffle the stack so you don't get two sheets fed as one, then babysit the ADF output tray (so the papers don't skew and eventually spill onto the floor). So even if you can load 50 sheets in the ADF, you can't just walk away and come back a couple minutes later. If there's a gray background, VRS does a great job making the type legible. But the shading creates a huge document, often 600Kb for a sheet scanned at 300 dpi, which you can knock back to less than half of that by manually using the Remove Stray Dots button.

Business card scanners are coming down in price too. Corex, the best-known of the brands (Iris, Visioneer, and Targus also sell them), now has a USB-powered scanner, the Corex 700C, which correctly scans most business cards that don't have an oddball (or italic) font. Its free online AccuCard service e-mails the card image back to the card owner for corrections. AccuCard is a great concept that could sink as users worry if the AccuCard e-mail is another online scam. (It's not.) The 700C's typical street price is around $250; it makes more sense when it's on sale in the $150 to $200 range.

While you can find a slew of flatbed scanners for less than $100 that do a great job with photos, there's no affordable negative or slide scanner. (Even if there were, scanning your old negatives can be a huge time sink.) Nor are there many affordable 11-by-17 or tabloid-size scanners for graphic artists (the tabloid Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL runs $1,400), although stitching software is adequate for the occasional big document. For photos, your best bet is to get a flatbed scanner with an ADF (HP, Visioneer, others), run your prints through at 100 dpi, and use those as a proof sheet quality guide to your pictures (or for passable display on screen or on a TV screen), then have your best images scanned professionally (if you can't find a friend with a film scanner, preferably one with automatic scratch reduction).