The use of computed tomography for dental procedures has increased recently. Cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) systems have been designed for imaging hard tissues of the dentomaxillofacial region. CBCT is capable of providing high resolution in images of high diagnostic quality. This technology allows for 3-dimensional representation of the dentomaxillofacial skeleton with minimal distortion, but at lower equipment cost, simpler image acquisition and lower patient dose. Because this technology produces images with isotropic sub-millimeter spatial resolution, it is ideally suited for dedicated dentomaxillofacial imaging. In this paper, we provide a brief overview of cone beam scanning technology and compare it with the fan beam scanning used in conventional CT and the basic principles of currently available CBCT systems.