Customer Reviews

Visioneer OneTouch 9220 Color Flatbed Scanner with Transparency Adapter

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I have owned a number of Visioneer scanners over the years and have always loved their capabilities for the price. I was a loyal customer and used, sold or recommended nearly a thousand of these scanners. Some of the features I liked best were:

- the top of the scanner opens on the vertical, 11" side, making it much easier to scan boxes.
- the driver remembered the last scan and would retain the settings. So if you were scanning multiple similar items, there was no need to keep adjusting the scanner settings.
- the scanner's reliability. I have had great luck with these scanners lasting longer than the computers they worked on.

And so I expected to see this trend continue with th 9220. I believe the hardware is up to the usual standards, but the driver isn't. Unfortunately, I can't even use this scanner.

I have tested it on 3 different computers (Windows 98 and 2000) with:

- Microsoft Photo Editor
- Microsoft Digital Image Pro 9

and it doesn't work! The Visioneer driver crashed both of these programs! So I called Visioneer. After being hung up on twice (I was asking very politely about this problem. Once I got hung up on by the voice mail system, and once by a tech support individual who told me he was going to research the question); I was told the Visioneer doesn't support any third-party software other than PaperPort!

I have always liked Visioneer scanners, but I can't possibly recommend the 9220 unless you are a fan of the PaperPort software, and understand that PaperPort may be the only software you will ever be able to use with this scanner.

I just wanted to report that contrary to what others are saying, this scanner works fine for me in XP SP2. It took me all of three minutes to get it working.

I downloaded the latest driver (an ancient one dated 7-30-03) and the driver said it couldn't connect to the scanner. Then I went to the Device Manager (it was listed as a non-working scanner under "Other devices") and said "reinstall driver" and it now works perfectly.

I doubt there is a problem with the driver itself, only with the driver being properly installed under SP2. If you install the driver normally then reinstall it under device manager, it works fine.

There's really nothing wrong with the scanner.

All I can say is "Buyer Beware". The system requirements list Windows XP, however the driver and paperport software do not run under Windows XP Service Pack 2. New computers now come with SP2 and anyone using Microsoft's automatic updates has probably been updated to SP2. Visioneer makes no mention of this in their product information and you really have to dig through their knowledge base to find out the scanner will not work with your system, once you've already bought it and the software fails to install. What a disappointment. Visioneer recommends that you uninstall Service Pack 2 and completely uninstall the paperport software. After you do that and if you still have a viable operating system, the scanner software will install and work.

My 9220 replaced an earlier model 6200, but was never as good. The higher speed scan was at the expense of quality and I had to bump DPI settings way up to 400 to get legible scans. As the machine aged, the scans got fainter, so I had to change to gray scale to be able to read printed docs and invoices after scanning. Then the color gave up and produced only garish reds in the scan. If it was a color printer I'd say that the black cartridge was empty!

We need a photo scanner and this one can't produce a usable color copy. I like the PaperPort software and will be looking for a compatible TWAIN scanner to use it with. Maybe Canon.