Buffered Reader - Buffered reader reads text from a character input stream and buffers those characters - Buffered reader has a buffer size of 8 KB - Buffered reader is synchronized and can be safely called from multiple threads - To parse for primitive data types additional functions needs to be called

Scanner - Scanner breaks down input into tokens and translates individual tokens according to their data type - Scanner has a buffer size of 1KB - Scanner is not synchronized - Scanner can parse for primitive types and strings using regular expressions

Source: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/io/BufferedReader.html http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/io/scanning.html