21/09/2026
A scanner datasheet describes a single point under ideal conditions. What reaches your drawing is something else: registration, drift, control, and the judgement of whoever modelled it. For a 100 m² apartment at 1:50, the drawing itself can only hold about 12 mm — capture it properly, constrain it with reference dimensions, report the residual, and a mid-range instrument gives you a plan you cannot tell apart from a survey-grade one.
But the part nobody talks about matters more. Scanning is not photography. On site, someone has to recognise that a step in the soffit is a downstand beam, that the pipe overhead is gravity drainage and if nobody thinks about it on site you end up with a pipe in the model that has no fall in it, that a wall 40 mm out of plumb is a finding rather than an error. Those decisions are irreversible once you leave the site.
And there is rarely one instrument. A total station sets the control the scanner registers to. A mobile unit covers the volume the scanner would be slow through. A tablet reaches the riser a tripod cannot. A caliper gives the modeller the real stud diameter or plate thickness, measured in a second, and that one dimension then corrects every instance of the member in the model. Choosing the combination is the job.
Ask a provider what they understand about your building or installation before you ask what their scanner is rated to.
Send us the project and what you need to draw from it.
