UK Document Management

If you are in the market for a portable flatbed scanner to accompany you on business trips then Canon’s ultra-thin CanoScan LiDE 35 should be at or near the top of your list.

Weighing in at a mere 1.7kg and measuring just 258 x 374 x 38mm, the CanoScan LiDE 35 uses an LED light source and, because this uses less power than conventional CCD technology, it can be powered via the USB 2.0 interface. So you don’t have to carry around a power supply; just plug it into your laptop and you can start scanning. Canon even supplies a USB cable with the CanoScan LiDE 35, which is a rare thing these days.

Canon also supplies a stand with the scanner so that you can use it on the desktop (only single sheets can be scanned like this) or store it upright to save even more space. Canon has designed the lid of the unit to accommodate moderately bulky items such as paperback books or magazines, but you cannot remove it completely to scan larger objects such as a hardback book. Also, because of the scanner’s low cost, you don’t get things like support for scanning negatives or slides.

Buying an efficient and good quality scanner when you’re on a tight budget is always a bit of a juggling act, depending upon whether your priority is speed or detail of reproduction.

The CanoScan 4200F was designed to meet this specific demand and on the whole manages to rise to the challenge. It has a maximum 3,200 x 6,400dpi (dots per inch) scanning capability and makes use of a USB 2.0 cable to transfer the images to your computer, so it’s designed to be both fast and accurate.

To speed the process up even faster, there are four ‘EZ’ buttons on the front of the scanner which allow you to copy directly to a printer via the computer, to save to a file or photo editing folder, to e-mail the image or to convert the picture into a PDF file that will then appear in Adobe Acrobat Reader. The flexible lid makes it easy to scan from thicker material like books or chunky magazines.

Cheap desktop scanners are fine for the odd few documents here and there, but can’t be shared on a network or cope with the demands of a document management system. For that you’ll need something a lot more capable. Such as the ScanFront 220 from Canon, which can be attached directly to the LAN and used to capture up to 1,000 documents a day.

Unlike some network scanners, the ScanFront 220 isn’t very big. Indeed, at first glance it could easily be mistaken for a fax machine, with documents to be scanned loaded into a feeder at the top then spat out again into a tray below.

In between is a complete Windows CE computer with an AMD Geode processor, 512MB of RAM and an 8.5-inch colour touch-screen, plus a 10/100Mbps network interface and two USB 2.0 ports to enable documents to be scanned directly to USB thumb drives.

Another plus with the ScanFront 220 is that it’s a lot quicker than most desktop scanners, with a maximum throughput of 26 pages per minute for black and white and 16ppm for colour (at 150dpi). Added to which both sides of a page can be scanned at the same time, so for double-sided documents that rises to 52 and 32 images per minute respectively.

When Canon first introduced its LIDE flatbed scanners, they were the only devices on the market to be USB powered and ultra-slim. Then Xerox brought out its 7400 model, with a similar design to the LIDE. Now the Xerox 7600 is the latest in the range and is being marketed as a photo scanner for the SOHO market.

This doesn’t really match what the 7600 is. It’s a slim, A4 flatbed scanner, without a backlight in the lid and with a maximum optical resolution of 1,200ppi. This means there’s no way you can use it to scan transparencies or photo negatives, which need a higher resolution and illumination from behind. That just leaves photographic prints, and while the scanner is quite capable of scanning these, so is just about every other scanner sold for use in the home.

What you actually have in the Xerox 7600 is a general-purpose document and print scanner, which is easy to set up as it needs no external power. It draws everything it needs from its single USB connection, though this is rather oddly positioned at the front end of the scanner’s right-hand side. Since one of the main advantages of the 7600 is its single cable, why not make the most of it and connect it at the rear?

Business scanners, designed for high speed conversion of paper documents to digital ones, can cost a lot, but Kodak’s ScanMate i1120 comes in at under £400 which is comparatively inexpensive. The ScanMate is designed much like other sheet-feed scanners, with pages feeding from the near-vertical tray at the top, down through the device and out to an output tray that sits nearly parallel with the desktop, at the front.

To reduce the footprint of the scanner, Kodak has angled the downward path steeply, so paper has to make a sharp turn onto the output tray. This means sheets rub against each other and a batch can look pretty untidy by the end of a run. Both the input and output trays fold away when the scanner isn’t in use.

The ScanMate has dual scan heads, so one or both sides of a page can be scanned at once. Kodak rates the ScanMate i1120 at 20ppm and when scanning at 200dpi, suitable for archival as PDF files, we saw slightly more than the rated speed. It drops as the resolution increases, of course, and at 300dpi, the minimum needed for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), it’s taking nearly two minutes for 20 pages.

Flatbed scanners range from about £40 to several thousand pounds, so how does the technology improve as the price increases? The maximum resolution and colour depth of scans increases, facilities like transparency scanning come into play and, perhaps above all, the quality of the scans should improve.

HP’s ScanJet G4050 costs well under £200, but has several features that suggest it’s a high-end device. The main unit has a bulbous lid, supported on a well-sprung hinge, and this contains a secondary scanning sensor. This means that the scanner can handle transmissive media such as transparencies and film, as well as reflective media such as text pages and photographic prints.

Various combinations of slides and negative film can be laid on the flatbed, using the holders supplied, including up to sixteen 35mm transparencies, thirty frames of 35mm film, two medium-format frames or a single 4 x 5-inch negative. Dedicated buttons set into the lid of the scanner start a paper scan, a film scan, a scan for print or a scan to PDF. These functions all work with the HP Scanning driver, so you don’t need to control all scanning tasks from your PC or Mac.

All-in-One printer/scanner/copier machines are all the rage at present, especially if you’re trying to run a home office or small business on a fairly limited budget. However, the frustration for dedicated amateur and semi-pro photographers is that most multi-function machines manage to do several tasks reasonably well but none of them to a high enough degree of excellence.

For this reason, a dedicated photo scanner or printer will always appeal to the keen snapper who demands high quality reproductions. Epson has been aware of this for some time and its Perfection Photo series has concentrated on meeting this need for those who don’t have huge amounts of money but have plenty of enthusiasm.

The main joy about the Perfection V500 Photo is that it caters for a wide range of standard and non-standard formats and it doesn’t keep you hanging around before it starts scanning. It’s designed to be visually cool in jet black with a silver strip around the middle. Controls are kept to the usual minimum: four one-touch buttons at the front for power and sending to PDF, e-mail and conventional printer, plus a USB 2.0 port at the back to connect to your PC.

The first thing you notice when you unpack the contents is that you have not one but two film holders. The first can contain up to twelve frames of 35mm film and a maximum of four 35mm transparencies, while the second will hold one frame of 6 x 12cm medium format film, a much neglected photographic format. Once inserted in the relevant holder, you align them next to the appropriate indicated letter on the document table and away you go. Using 6,400dpi optical resolution and 3.4 optical density, the results are impressive.

Manchester Document Scanning

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.