Need advice about German OCR and scanners

I have to read essays in German for my research. My German is very bad
so I decided to purchase scanner with a German OCR to make the
translation more quickly (using computerized dictionary)
My qustions are:

1. Do I need a good scanner (to be able to read old German fonts) or a
basic scanner will do the job together with a good OCR?

2. Has anyone got an idea about a good German OCR for my purposes?

Many thanks 

Yanki