I think they work pretty well for small items that can mount on the turntable, but they aren't something you can just wave around in the air and capture good data with. And Solidworks, while it's a good program for designing parts from scratch, can't do much with imported meshes, which is what scanners typically deliver. If the parts you're scanning are relatively small, a Roland turntable-type laser-scanner might work - the work envelope on the LPX-600 is 9.5" diameter by 16" H. If they're larger, then a hand-held scanner like the UniScan from Creaform (which we also sell) is probably your best bet.
To reverse-engineer a mechanical-type part from scan data, you want something like Rapidform XOR in between the scanner and Solidworks - that allows you to recover "design intent" - clean geometry instead of the rather noisy meshes that scanners produce.
Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com