If you're a home business computer user, you've probably passed through the same stages of scanning as me.

Ten years you switched from DOS to Windows, and discovered that it was surprisingly easy to add detailed images to your documents. You could buy an fair-resolution Logitech black-and-white hand-scanner for about $90.

You bought the scanner and spend a day or two seeing what you could scan besides your hand. Dollar bills, photographs, and corporate logos could brighten the margins of a report or desktop-published piece.

And what a kick it was to to create a near-photographic image in just a few seconds! The first scanners boasted a tremendous toy factor.

But their halftones were lumpy and moirčed. The black-and-white was a major limitation. And the hand-based scanner jiggled while you used it, causing the images to do the hula.

You could have bought a flatbed scanner, but at $600-$900 they were prohibitively expensive.

Into the drawer went your hand scanner. Later, as bandwidth broadened, you may have picked up another hand scanner, which tracked better and yielded better results. Or, more recently, you got one of those Visioneer Paperport roll-up scanners, that scan images the way a washer wringer squeezes suds from overalls. A full-page scanner didn't make your photos curly. But its $400 price tag has that effect on you.

OK, now it's today, and suddenly you see that the price of a page scanner has come way, way down. You can get a pretty darn good flatbed scanner for what you paid for your original hand scanner.

Last month I bought, on impulse, a UMAX 610P. Cost: about $100. Though far from state-of-the-art, it is terrific for the kinds of work I do in my business, desktop and web publishing.

Consider what $100 bought me. I got a Windows-compatible, TWAIN-compliant, 600 dots-per-inch color scanner. The color is good and can appear in over a billion permutations. The footprint is smaller than an opened copy of Time magazine. But it lets me scan just about anything -- even my hand.

And it comes bundled with Presto PageManager, to run the scanner, and Adobe Photo Deluxe, to alter the graphics once you create them. I found PageManager a snap to operate. You let the scanner warm up, you take a pre-scan to tell the scanner what it is up against, and a final scan to crop the exact picture.

PageManager also does basic optical character recognition, turning scanned print into workable text. I think mine was set for Hittite, though, because I got only about 15% accuracy.

Photo Deluxe, a good image processing program, was harder to learn and gave me some installation problems. I've been using Corel PhotoPaint instead. The effects possibilities are great. Today I scanned an author's black and white book jacket photo, then ran the image through a PhotoPaint color screen to create a duotone.

One problem I had in the past with the Visioneer Paperport scanner was cabling. Mine was a serial port model, and my serial port was already taken by the external modem. So I was always juggling between the two devices. Because the UMAX uses a "pass-through parallel" hookup, you no longer have to switch back and forth. Simply connect the scanner to the PC's printer port, and your printer to the scanner. Your printer never knows the scanner is there, which is good, because it would be jealous. The UMAX is lots more fun than a laser printer.

Not everything is great, of course. The UMAX 610P is slow. A first scan takes a good four minutes, minimum. Worse, the machine is an attention hog -- it won't let you use other Windows programs during the four minutes, no matter how much RAM you have, how big a print spool you have, or how good a multitasker Windows 95 is. So keep a book handy.

The UMAX 610P also solves a common home office problem -- making color copies. If you have a color printer, you can use the copy utility to send a scan directly from your scanner to the printer. It's like a color copier, for under $100.

The great breakthrough use for a cheap color scanner right now is for creating web site graphics. If you've got a text-based web site, pictures will revolutionize your thinking. Vacation snaps, symbols, logos, business portraits, even swatches of fabric are easy to scan and upload for the fascinated world. But easy does it -- pictures slow everything way down.

My favorite use of the UMAX has been to digitize old photographs for my site. I have a set of three penny-arcade photo-strips of me and my daughter that we took when she was 1 year old. In the first series I'm a new dad and I'm coaxing Daniele to match my expression in the mirror. She is adorable, but she can't imitate me fast enough to catch the camera click. But in the second and third, a few months later, we're in perfect synch.

But words can't do the pictures justice. Come to http://mfinley.com/gallery and see for yourself.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.