UK Document Management

With flatbed scanners starting at around £50, a first reaction to Xerox’s DocuMate 262 is to ask how the company can charge £599 + VAT for it. This is a different breed of machine from your average flatbed, though, and intended for a different purpose. It’s a sheet-feed scanner, so it’s ideal for sheets of paper or photos, and it can scan both sides of the sheet in one pass, known as duplex scanning. However, it can’t scan books or other bound documents.

It’s a small, neat machine, very solidly made, looking something like a small inkjet printer. With a plastic feed tray at the rear and another to receive scanned documents at the front, its desktop footprint is actually quite large and, although you can fold the feed tray forward when the scanner’s not in use, the output tray takes up room unless your remove it altogether. If you site the DocuMate 262 permanently on a busy desk, it may get in the way.

Controls on the scanner are few and easy to understand. There are three buttons down the right-hand side of the top panel and a button at back-left to release the top cover, in case of paper jams. Two of the control buttons select simplex or duplex scanning and the third works in conjunction with a seven-segment LCD display.

This shows a number from 1 to 9 and refers to pre-defined settings for different scan types; paper or photo, text or image, black and white or colour. All these settings can be modified to your needs, which is just as well, since even on a fully UK version of windows XP, they come in offering US Letter as the default paper size.