Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Affordable Duplex Scanning, but some issues., January 26, 2007
Finally, a (relatively) affordable duplex scanner with automatic document feed! I literally have boxes of papers and magazines I've been waiting to scan, but have never been able to find a quality, affordable scanner.
For all the good things about this scanner, be sure to read the PC Magazine review (July 2006).
Here, I wanted to mention a few downsides that were not evident from the Xerox product specifications or the PC Mag review.
1) Pages per Minute - the Xerox specs state 15 pages per minute for color duplex (both sides) scan at 150 dpi. Realistically, for anything with images/pictures, 150dpi is too low, so I end up scanning at 400dpi (typically magazine pages). At this setting, the scanner only scans 1.6 pages per minute! It seems that part of the slowness is related to the driver/software, as about 40% of the scan time is due to the driver/software "catching up" with the physical scanner.
2) ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) Capacity - the Xerox specs state the feeder holds 50 pages. This may be true, however, it is not possible to use this capacity, due to what I consider to be a major software flaw. The driver software actually times out after a certain amount of processing time. I haven't found any way to change this setting (nor any mention of it in the documentation). So, if I put in any more than about 8 pages in the ADF and perform a color duplex scan at 400dpi, the scan job will complete on the hardware, and then the software will actually time out and erase the entire scan job! You may get a few more pages by reducing dpi or going black and white. But beware, that you could find yourself having to load only 8 pages at a time.
3) Image lines - the scanner lamp seems to be affected by dust/paper "lint" heavily. About every 100 pages scanned, I start seeing red and green lines showing up on my scans. I then have to open up the scanner and dust/wipe off the lamp cover. This is not as easy as it sounds, as the opening is very narrow, and sometimes it takes 2-3 tries before the lines really go away.
4) Error Handling - I consider another major software flaw to be that whenever a scanner error occurs (usually a paper jam), the software deletes the entire scan job (all pages scanned before the error). So, if you've just waited 5 minutes for a scan job to complete and the last page jams, the software deletes all the pages already scanned, and you have to start all over! Another reason that you won't necessarily want to or be able to use the full ADF capacity.
So far, I'm still on the fence regarding whether these issues will cause me to return the scanner. (I've been using the scanner for about 2 weeks).
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Can use some Improvements, December 20, 2007
Pros...It took less than 15 minutes to set up and install, it's compact, it can be fast(see below) and it has the duplex feature.
Cons...I'll bore you to death. For starters the One Touch driver fails to provide a decent PDF image, if you want to use PDF format, you will have to use the Twain driver, I contacted tech support twice and on both calls they advised to uninstall and reinstall the drivers(quick way to get rid of you), needless to say it didn't fix the problem, tried it on another pc and got the same problem, gave up on it and decided to use TIFF files when using the One Touch function. One Touch feature won't allow you to set a default name for your documents, you have to go back and rename it. It jams about 15% of the time, especially with thin paper, don't leave it unattended if you are scanning important documents. If you use the VRS option included in the One Touch driver it will make the scanning process slower 'cause it has to convert every page it scans, otherwise it is fast. Wake up! am not finished here...PaperPort 11 is slow, I reinstalled ver.9, which is faster and works all the time. The Business Card application was extremely slow and inaccurate, I removed it. As far as the OmniPage and the other software I haven't tried it so I have no comments. The ADF tabs that keep the documents aligned are to short/small and the papers tend to move sideways.
If this will be your first and only scanner you may be happy with it, however if you have used other scanners in the same price/features range you will not be happy. I have a Brother simplex flatbed scanner with ADF and it performs much better, better resolution and faster but I purchased this one for the duplex function and that it does well.
I personally believe that if they fix the One Touch driver and include some flexibility in it, this can be a 4 stars scanner.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Documate 152 - Small and mostly good at what its designed for, January 27, 2007
Dainty little machine when the paper trays are in their folded up positions. Still quite small looking with the trays folded out. Have been working with the machine perched on my desktop tower case.
Mostly works like a champ. Once you learn the software and get it configured for what you are doing, you put in a stack of sheets and push the button and (except for problems noted below) you come back several minutes later and you have a PDF with the scanned images of the pages with searchable text.
The caveats are as follows:
While regular printer/copier paper rarely misfeeds, notebook paper sometimes has problems with more that one sheet being grabbed at a time.
In cases where the pages had been torn at perforations (think old tractor feed paper) sometimes the scanner will get partway through a job and then can't get the next sheet to feed without some help from the user.
The out tray has an upwards curvature in it which can make a feeding sheet push around the top sheet in the output tray. Sometimes a previous page gets dumped on the floor and the rest of the output stack is usually a bit disheveled. This more of a problem with wrinkled, torn or hole punched sheets than with sheets in good condition.
On the input tray the adjustable side guides do not go up far enough. With a large stack of paper some sheets will start feeding slightly askew but then straighten out gradually as they feed. The result is a scanned image that has a slight curvature in the image. Cutting down on how many pages in a stack and vigilance on checking the guides to eliminate slop helps a lot.
Have had a few problems with driver seeming to freeze. Cycling the scanner power usually un-seizes things.
A magazine review claimed that the scanner included OmniPage Pro 14, however, mine was shipped with Omnipage Pro 12. OCR accuracy seems pretty good but of couple of options that the scanner owners manual describes as appearing in certain dialog boxes simply aren't there on my computer.
There's a bit of a learning curve for the included software. The front end they created to simplify managing scanning and OCR has a decent amount of power but the interface seems a bit clunky to me for anyone who wants customize for a wide variety of paper sizes and contrasts.
On an X2 4200+ machine scanning at 200 dpi on both sides of page the OCR did not keep up with scanning and the front end does not appear to allow new scan to start till OCR is fully completed with previous batch of sheets so I could not keep the scanner more than perhaps 50% active.
If it had shipped with OmniPage Pro 14, I would have given it 4 stars.
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