Scanner drivers work a little differently from other devices. Besides the Windows plug-and-play driver that installs automatically when you connect the scanner, there is also a software driver that provides the scanner control interface. There are 2 types of driver software, called TWAIN and ISIS.

TWAIN and ISIS are the two most common scanner drivers, which allow the scanner to be recognized by scanning software. Different software look for different drivers, but most scanning applications will at least recognize the TWAIN driver. If a scanner does not have either of these, it probably works with a proprietary driver and will only be recognized by the software that it comes bundled with, so you won’t be able to scan directly into any software you purchase separately.

Virtually all scanners, sheetfed or flatbed, come with TWAIN drivers, and virtually all scanning applications support TWAIN. High-speed document scanners usually come with ISIS drivers, which tend to be more standardized and offer better performance with faster scanner models. Some high-volume scanning applications only use ISIS drivers, and we recommend using ISIS in any document scanning application when the choice is there.