Scanners

Scanners, along with Imaging Software, are the core components of a paperless office system--the initial capture point hardware for paper conversion into a digital image system.  Think of a scanner are a superior copier substitute--much smaller, cheaper to buy and less expensive to operate with no consumable paper or toner cartridges, and no paper by-product.

Scanners technology has advanced dramatically in recent years, and the range of scanners is quite wide--from $50 sheet-fed home units suitable for a few documents a week to hundreds of thousands of dollar hi-speed mass production units that can image a warehouse in short order.

What should you look for and how do you choose?  The modern ECM theory favors multiple work group models distributed through out the office rather than the single hi-speed units in vogue some years ago.  Look for design efficiency, which largely determines speed (measured in pages per minute), ability to do duplex (two sided copies in one pass), monthly work load capacity (the best indicator of reliability), commercial ISIS drivers (rather than TWAIN home-quality drivers) to work with commercial programs, bundled software that produces images in non-proprietary formats (such as PDF and Tiff), and of course price.

What We Recommend--And Use Ourselves:

We spent a lot of time evaluating the many scanner choices before partnering with what we considered the best makers--the ones we use ourselves:  Xerox® and Visioneer®.

Our scanner partner selection was corroborated by the imaging industry last year when these products won every major industry scanning award in their classes:  AIIM Best of Show and Product of the Year, Best of Retail Vision, Better Buys for Business Editor's Choice, and the coveted Virtual Office News Product of the Year.

The AIIM Awards are especially prestigious because AIIM, as the Enterprise Content Management industry's trade association, bases its Awards on  demonstrated creative use of technology, business value, and return on investment in ECM solutions.

This unpredecented convergence of the best quality and the best price makes the right choice easy.  We can help you match the precise number and mix of scanners to most effectively satisfy your paper capture needs.

Xerox® is the best-known name in imaging technology--most people still call a photocopy a "Xerox".  When Xerox® resolved to become the undisputable scanner leader, it decided the surest way to do this would be to partner with another well recognized imaging leader--Visioneer, a company well-known for its cost-effective scanners and bundled software.

Under this partner-licensing arrangement, Xerox® has produced an unbeatable line of workgroup scanners that have won AIIM Product of the Year awards back to back in 2004 and 2005 by setting new performance standards and under-pricing the competition by 25% to 75%, including: 

     The Xerox® DocuMate 252 offering 25 ppm (50 duplex), commercial reliability, including bundled ISIS drivers and industry-standard Kofax VRS image software plus Scansoft PaperPort Pro (Imaging) and OmniPage Pro (OCR) software, all for under $1,000.  This model won the AIIM 2004 Product of the Year Award.  Read more.

     Close on the heels of the DocuMate 252 is the newer and faster Xerox® DocuMate 262.  With more speed (33 ppm simplex-66 ppm duplex) and the same high quality software bundle for only another $200, the DocuMate 262 has already won rave reviews from Transform Magazine and a Bottom Line of outperforming others at more than twice the price from PC Magazine.  Read more.

    The latest addition is the Xerox® Documate 272 has the same rugged specifications as the DocuMate 262, but it also adds the ability to scan both sides of plastic cards.  This model won the AIIM 2005 Product of the Year Award.  Read more.

     Visioneer®

makes its own similar line of commercial quality scanners with slightly different features and the same bundled software that should also be considered. 

See, for example, the Strobe XP 450 for a low-cost, hi-speed business workgroup scanner with Scansoft PaperPort Delux (Imaging) and TextBridge (OCR) software for under $700.

Note especially the Strobe XP 100 and XP 200 models, which offer low cost sheet fed units for wide-spread staff as well as mobile and executive capture deployment.  Read more on how low cost Strobe XP's saved a large hospital 25% of its departmental labor costs--a payback period measured in days.