UPDATED! in the market for a hi-end SCANNER

[Alex]

updates... see last post plz! thx to all who have been helping me! :beer:

for business use at the office... we are looking for the fastest possible scanner within a reasonable price range... its a small company but willing to invest in the whole 'paperless' thing...

so another important thing is the software bundle... it would be good to find one (if possible!) that came with software that allowed full-fledged PDF creation without costing an arm and a leg... (lol i cant believe how much adobe charges for their stuff...)

ANY and ALL suggestions welcome!

thanks!
-frang

 

[kranky]

If you only need 8.5x11 max size, look at the Fujitsu fi-5110EOX. Outputs directly to PDF, scans both sides of the paper and automatically removes blank pages from the output, has a 50-sheet feeder, and includes a full version of Acrobat 6. About $450 or less.

It doesn't support TWAIN if that's an issue.

 

[PhoenixOrion]

HP Scanjet 55xx series or 82xx series. Starting around $300 with automatic document feeders, it makes life easy.

55xx series are fast: 30 secs into OCR.

 

[ribbon13]

CutePDF?

I have an Epson Perfection 3200 Photo. It hauls ass.

 

[Alex]

Originally posted by: kranky
If you only need 8.5x11 max size, look at the Fujitsu fi-5110EOX. Outputs directly to PDF, scans both sides of the paper and automatically removes blank pages from the output, has a 50-sheet feeder, and includes a full version of Acrobat 6. About $450 or less.

It doesn't support TWAIN if that's an issue.

wow this seems almost too good to be true... i was looking at smoe HP and EPSON models and they were all $850+

at the risk of sounding ignorant... how will not supporting TWAIN affect things? i really have no scanner experience apart from scanning photos lol, hence my posting here...

 

[Alex]

KRANKY you mentioned it comes with a full version of Adobe 6... however on the website it says standard... can anyone elucidate me please

 

[ribbon13]

yeah... full copy of standard, not crippled. not pro.

 

[MrAustin]

Standard will probably do all you need it to and more.

 

[Arcanedeath]

If your company already has a high end or decent copier most offer scanner modules or options to convert them into printers as well as copy / fax units. It might be worth looking into if all you need is black and white.

 

[Alex]

Originally posted by: Arcanedeath
If your company already has a high end or decent copier most offer scanner modules or options to convert them into printers as well as copy / fax units. It might be worth looking into if all you need is black and white.

the bulk is BW but there are some important charts and graphs etc that really need the colour..

 

[Arcanedeath]

It still might be worth looking into if its not that expensive as it gives you more options and is prolly faster than most of the cheaper scanners you'll be looking at.

 

[kranky]

TWAIN allows you to have other apps control the scanner. For example, you could open Photoshop and tell it to get an image from a scanner that supports TWAIN. The Fujitsu doesn't support TWAIN so that means you must use the Fujitsu software to operate the scanner.

If you want to have other apps use the scanner to get images, then TWAIN is going to be important. If all you need to do is scan paper to PDF, then it won't matter.

Another point to keep in mind is that scanners that output to PDF only provide a scanned image with a PDF "wrapper" around it. You can't search for text, etc. unless you run the PDF through an OCR program, which creates its own set of problems.

As ribbon13 said, the version of Acrobat 6 is the standard, non-crippled, non-pro version. When I said "full version" I meant that it's not just the Acrobat Reader.

 

[Alex]

Originally posted by: kranky
TWAIN allows you to have other apps control the scanner. For example, you could open Photoshop and tell it to get an image from a scanner that supports TWAIN. The Fujitsu doesn't support TWAIN so that means you must use the Fujitsu software to operate the scanner.

If you want to have other apps use the scanner to get images, then TWAIN is going to be important. If all you need to do is scan paper to PDF, then it won't matter.

Another point to keep in mind is that scanners that output to PDF only provide a scanned image with a PDF "wrapper" around it. You can't search for text, etc. unless you run the PDF through an OCR program, which creates its own set of problems.

As ribbon13 said, the version of Acrobat 6 is the standard, non-crippled, non-pro version. When I said "full version" I meant that it's not just the Acrobat Reader.

wow thats a pretty crucial point for me!! i think its important to be able to search the files... so what gives?

 

[alteredNate]

My dad bought the Canon 9950F for $400. It's pretty fast, however I don't have a huge amount of experiences with newer scanners (I worked alot with Agfa SCSIs about 5 years ago, and this thing blows them out of the water.)

I was impressed by the quality of negative and transparent scans with it.

Just my 2 sense.

 

[dullard]

From what I've seen, practical attempts at 'paperless' offices generally end up with more paper being used. Rather than one hardcopy of an important document being passed around the office, all 10 employees will print out their own copy since it is very unproductive to use electronic versions of most documents. The end result is 10 copies when all you needed was one. There was a study linked here months back that showed the same result (I can't find it in a search though).

There are other very good reasons to scan documents however. For example, it is much easier to find one quote in a scanned pile of documents than in a pile of books.

Is there any reason they must be PDFs? As an end-user of many document formats, I'd have to say that is the least convienent format ever invented. But that is just my personal opinion. I'd rather scan text documents right into Word or table documents right into Excel, etc.

 

[Alex]

Originally posted by: dullard
From what I've seen, practical attempts at 'paperless' offices generally end up with more paper being used. Rather than one hardcopy of an important document being passed around the office, all 10 employees will print out their own copy since it is very unproductive to use electronic versions of most documents. The end result is 10 copies when all you needed was one. There was a study linked here months back that showed the same result (I can't find it in a search though).

There are other very good reasons to scan documents however. For example, it is much easier to find one quote in a scanned pile of documents than in a pile of books.

Is there any reason they must be PDFs? As an end-user of many document formats, I'd have to say that is the least convienent format ever invented. But that is just my personal opinion. I'd rather scan text documents right into Word or table documents right into Excel, etc.

hey dullard thanks for your illuminating post!
there is no good reason why we selected PDF as the standard, i just thought since its universal/portable whatever, relatively compact and searchable it would be ideal.

How would one go about scanning directly into word or excel for instance? in that case TWAIN support would be required eh... i havent checked and we run office2000 here but does office 2003 have built in suport for aquiring stuff from scanners by any chance?

 

[dullard]

Many people like PDFs, I personally don't. They are very convenient for some uses. However they have drawbacks which include: slow loading time for version 6+, difficulty in making changes, and difficulty in saving changes. So if the documents won't be altered PDFs may be just fine. I happen to always need to alter PDFs and don't have the expensive Adobe software to do so. Thus, I dislike them.

Kranky was correct. If you want to do anything useful with the documents (such as put them into Word or search the text) you need an OCR program. Without the OCR program, you'll have a large series of unsearchable pictures. An OCR program converts the pictures into text, numbers, tables, etc. They are not perfect. Sometimes an the letter 'l' looks just like the number '1'. Same goes with the letter 'o', the letter 'O', and the number '0'. Most OCR programs will then run a spell check through the document which will catch most of those mistakes. However, all documents generally need a little manual adjustment after scanning to be perfect, especially if you have pictures which are mostly text (for example, a thought balloon in a comic strip) as the program has trouble determining if it is a picture or if it is text.

Most scanners should come with an OCR program. My latest scanner purchase came with ScanSoft OmniPage SE which works fairly well (occassionaly it will switch fonts in the middle of a sentence though). OmniPage then lets me save the document in a couple dozen formats (including Office 2000). This isn't a recommendation for OmniPage though as I haven't had much experience with other programs (I'm sure some are a lot better than others). They certainly are not perfect.

 

[piasabird]

You might want to go to a large comuter show or trade show and look at some scanners in big stores. Many times if you can find what you want you can buy it cheaper on the Internet or get a rebate or a trade-in or something like that. A storefront may charge you up to twice what something really costs.

 

[kranky]

The bigger issue than what piece of hardware to get is thinking through some of the points brought up regarding how you will need to use the files.

At one extreme is a slick document management system that addresses workflow, file access, OCR, etc. These aren't cheap but they are powerful.

At the other extreme is a low-tech home-grown approach which could be as simple as scanning to PDF, skip the OCR, and maintain a spreadsheet or Access database that lists the filename for each scanned file along with a number of keywords that someone decided should be associated with that scanned file. You can't search the entire file contents (since you didn't use OCR and clean it up) but if you can live with using a certain number of keywords to locate files, it could work. Less powerful but very cheap.

And there are plenty of options in between those two extremes.

Make sure you know exactly how people want to use the files before making a decision. Scanning documents is trivially easy - living with them is a lot tougher!

 

[Alex]

thanks for all the replies keep em comin!

dullard thanks again for the detailed post! i made some notes about it and i will discuss the situation with my boss, because none of us realized the ramifications and implications of what we are trying to do I'll have to make a format choice depending on his goals and expectations and only then start looking at scanners.

ill post back when i know!! thx again u guys are awesome!

 

[dullard]

Good luck. What you are trying to do is very much a real possibility. And it can work quite well. However, the transition is not a simple process - it will take manual labor. The better the initial planning, the less labor it will be. It all comes down to the details - 10 pages or 10,000? Computer smart employees or not? Simple text or just graphics or a complex combination of both?

 

[kranky]

Originally posted by: franguinho
How would one go about scanning directly into word or excel for instance? in that case TWAIN support would be required eh... i havent checked and we run office2000 here but does office 2003 have built in suport for aquiring stuff from scanners by any chance?

Office 2003 has a feature called Office Document Imaging which appears to support scanning and OCR directly from Office applications. Might want to research that, I haven't used it myself. For that you surely would need a TWAIN-compliant scanner.

 

[Alex]

Originally posted by: kranky

Originally posted by: franguinho
How would one go about scanning directly into word or excel for instance? in that case TWAIN support would be required eh... i havent checked and we run office2000 here but does office 2003 have built in suport for aquiring stuff from scanners by any chance?

Office 2003 has a feature called Office Document Imaging which appears to support scanning and OCR directly from Office applications. Might want to research that, I haven't used it myself. For that you surely would need a TWAIN-compliant scanner.

wow excellent thats really reassuring! i guess i'll have to test that in my own time and find out, unless someone can confirm that this works like we think it does!

kranky & dullard thanks a lot guys! :beer:

I'll discuss this further here at work and make a detailed plan for this project!

-frang

 

[Alex]

UPDATED! THURSDAY
--

Ok, so after discussing this with everyone else involved this morning, we decided that it is not important at all for the files to be searchable, and, further still, they don't need to be any format other than JPG.

the reason for this is: the company that makes our management software offers an add-on that offers integrated document retrieval but it is all in jpg form. They have their own database to link the files to the clients and it all works very well apparently.

SO, really the only important thing is that the scanner has the following features:

- Automated Document Feeder
- Dual-sided scanning
- FAST FAST FAST!

THe budget once again is pretty flexible and this time around, TWAIN support is also recommended!

I'm currently looking at the HP Scanjet 8250

Does anyone have any experience with this scanner? Any other recomendations?

Thanks!!

-frang

 

[dullard]

Originally posted by: franguinho
Ok, so after discussing this with everyone else involved this morning, we decided that it is not important at all for the files to be searchable, and, further still, they don't need to be any format other than JPG.

Good to know a little discussion first may have saved a lot of effort later. As for recommendations, you are far out of my league. Good luck. There has to be a professional scanner review somewhere out there.