Customer Reviews

Visioneer OneTouch 8700 USB Scanner

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This scanner was a wonderful surprise in a market swimming with inferior machines that leave you with ugly scans and a lot of headaches.

I use this to take close-up photos of jewelry for eBay auctions, so the photos need to be clear and the color true or people will bite your head off :o). I will admit that the reason I went for this one was because of the price (and the fact that it wasn't made by HP). I was spending double on Hewlitt Packard scanners and, one year later on the nose everytime, each one of them broke. Their customer service was as lousy as their products.

You do need to be just a little scanner savvy in the beginning to get the configurations right for whatever you're scanning, but once you get the hang of it your images come out beautiful (the color is brilliant). I have Millenium, and had no problem setting everything up.

Don't buy this scanner if you are using Windows XP or if you want to do custom scans. The OneTouch feature works well, but I've had bad luck with the TWAIN driver locking up software. It also doesn't work with the Windows XP "switch user" feature because it will crash the scanner driver and the scanner itself goes crazy. Visioneer tech support confirmed that they don't support the "switch user" feature.

After 1 week of trying to get it to work correctly with my printers I finally returned it to Best Buy who accepted it with no questions asked. It seemed to work fine with documents but not with photos. Not much HELPFUL documentation, tech support answered my E-mails quickly but kept referring me elsewhere. One-touch buttons are fine for simple documents but if you need to change the printer settings for better quality it takes awhile. This was a replacement for my HP4200 which gave me much nicer photos. The Visioneer OneTouch 8700 would probably be fine for some scans but not photo quality.

I bought this scanner in time for Christmas in order to create gifts that could utilize pictures that were taken when I was a kid. Setup was easy (I have Windows XP) though I did have to restart my computer twice before it even recognized the CD installation disk. Otherwise, installation was a breeze and I was scanning family photos in a snap. Quality of the scanning was more than adequate for my needs. It's not the quietest scanner but it's also relatively compact and is extremely snazzy in it's black shell. I have not tried the other buttons/features on the scanner such as email, ocr or fax.

I used to have a UMAX scanner and that was a nightmare that liked to crash my computers down to a blue screen. My new Visioneer scanner makes up for these headaches and I'm completely happy with what you get for the price.

I almost canceled my order after reading some of the reviews. Glad I didn't. My operating system is Win XP. I read the manual BEFORE installing, and also removed all traces of the previous HP scanner.

The software installed on the first attempt, and I was up and scanning in no time. I do believe the only problem with this excellent scanner and software package, is that the included software offers way too much for the novice. If you are not familiar with using a scanner and have no knowledge of using a graphics program, then you had better Read the Manual beforehand to avoid installation problems, and to better understand how to utilize this product.

Excellent product and an outstanding value.

I just got this scanner, followed the quick install directions (on my Win XP machine) and everything worked perfectly right away. Peaple love to blame XP for their software problems when 95% of the time the real problem is some other "junk" software they installed at one time. Scanner is quick for USB 1 and the scans look great.

I got this scanner with my computer system. It works really well. I like it when you press one of the buttons on the scanner and it auto-crops the thing you are scanning automatically. If you have Win 2k, the drivers that are on the cd will not work. Just go to windows update to get it to work.

I didn't have difficulty installing the thing, though the cd-rom didn't autoload correctly (but instead went to a submenu for installing other programs like Acrobat and Internet Explorer). Still, installation for anyone with some computer savvy is a breeze. The manual is very abbreviated, so those who are novices may have difficulty if they need to troubleshoot.

Update:

I removed the remainder of my original review. I still think that this machine produces so-so quality scans, but it is better than I originally thought. The scans, even at the highest dpi, are snowy/grainy looking. My previous scanner produced different (but also flawed) images at the same resolution. Where my other scanner (an Acer) produced scans with a coarse texture (larger dots/scan lines were visible), the Visioneer reduces this "noise" to a finer level. What initially seemed like inferior scans to me are simply different. I suppose that one would need to buy a high priced/high quality machine (and have the requisite computing power for it to run) to get truly photo-quality scans. This scanner is okay for casual work, just like an inexpensive digital camera is okay for candid shots of friends and family.

I got one of these for Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The box advertises OCR abilities and there is an 'OCR' button on the scanner body.

Setup was easy and the scanner speed seemed very good. It looks like a fairly nice scanner for photos..

After going through all the setting options, I never got OCR output with better than about 60% accuracy (most settings produced no OCR output at all). The Canon N656U is much slower, but produces acceptable OCR results.

I think this scanner works great! I am using WinXP pro and I had the scanner working in minutes.

I use twain to scan and have not used the one button features yet, I may never use them as the twain interface is more to my liking.

I think if you are looking for a good basic scanner this is a good choice.

Update: I've been using this scanner for a couple of weeks now and I like it even more...its not fast at higher resolutions but it produces excellent scans and I would recommend it to anyone, with the free shipping and rebate its unbeatable.