Fast document scanner?

[Ian]

There was a thread on this group a while back with recommendation
for a fast, double sided document scanner with ADF. I had a dig through
google groups, the closest I could see was the Fujitsu ScanSnap
(presumably the S500?).

Was that the one?

I have some shelves full of magazines I'd like to archive and get rid of.
These have lots of schematics, pictures, graphs as well as text. Would
there be any problem with the lack of any way to get other than pdf
out of the scanner?

Some of the magazines are pretty old and yellowed, would it deal OK
with that?

Regards
Ian

 

[Danny]

Hi Ian,

The S500 ScanSnap does an incredible job of feeding the widest range
of your typical documents fast and reliably. Nevertheless, the design
is still a friction ADF scanner meaning that there's 2 primary parts
which A) Pulls the page thats going to be captured as well as B)
seperates or holds back the rest of the documets stacked on the ADF (up
to 40+ need to stay stationary while only one sheet pulls through at a
time.

The S500 is unique mechanically among scanners for the same price range
because it allows the owner to not only easily clean the critical
frictioin parts (Pick Roller & Seperation Pad Assembly) but, also
quickly replace them when they've exceeded their lifspan (50k- sep pad
assy/ 100k pgs.- Pic roller) without costing a fortune (approx. $20 pad
assy/ $35 pic roller). And since Fujitsu carries all parts until 5
years after announcing the end of life, you'll be able to use that
scanner for many years to come without being forced to upgrade due to a
lack of spare parts.

If your magazine pages are anything as thin as an NCR document
(carbonless copy paper) or as thick as a post card, the ADF will most
likely have no problems handling batches of these. If you'd have
trouble turning the pages with your hands, chances are so would the
scanner. Pages damaged from water and other factors causing them to
stick together would be difficult for any ADF to seperate so common
sense would still need to be exercised.

Depending on how many pages are in your collection of magazines, and if
you have a reasonable timeframe to gradually scan them to pdf, the
ScanSnap would be a great inexpensive choice. Keep in mind the
hardware's daily duty cycle is 250pgs/ day...

All things considered, the ScanSnap lineup is so popular because of the
ease of scanning to pdf, automatic color detection, deskew, deshad
based on the actual pages, speed 18ppm/36ipm, 2 CCD sensors for single
pass duplex scanning, and incredible price. It's arguably the best bang
for the buck...

Hope this helps~

Danny Ha

 

[Edward Kroeze]

Hi Ian,

The S500 ScanSnap does an incredible job of feeding the widest range
of your typical documents fast and reliably. Nevertheless, the design
is still a friction ADF scanner meaning that there's 2 primary parts
which A) Pulls the page thats going to be captured as well as B)
seperates or holds back the rest of the documets stacked on the ADF (up
to 40+ need to stay stationary while only one sheet pulls through at a
time.

The S500 is unique mechanically among scanners for the same price range
because it allows the owner to not only easily clean the critical
frictioin parts (Pick Roller & Seperation Pad Assembly) but, also
quickly replace them when they've exceeded their lifspan (50k- sep pad
assy/ 100k pgs.- Pic roller) without costing a fortune (approx. $20 pad
assy/ $35 pic roller). And since Fujitsu carries all parts until 5
years after announcing the end of life, you'll be able to use that
scanner for many years to come without being forced to upgrade due to a
lack of spare parts.

If your magazine pages are anything as thin as an NCR document
(carbonless copy paper) or as thick as a post card, the ADF will most
likely have no problems handling batches of these. If you'd have
trouble turning the pages with your hands, chances are so would the
scanner. Pages damaged from water and other factors causing them to
stick together would be difficult for any ADF to seperate so common
sense would still need to be exercised.

Depending on how many pages are in your collection of magazines, and if
you have a reasonable timeframe to gradually scan them to pdf, the
ScanSnap would be a great inexpensive choice. Keep in mind the
hardware's daily duty cycle is 250pgs/ day...

All things considered, the ScanSnap lineup is so popular because of the
ease of scanning to pdf, automatic color detection, deskew, deshad
based on the actual pages, speed 18ppm/36ipm, 2 CCD sensors for single
pass duplex scanning, and incredible price. It's arguably the best bang
for the buck...

Single pass-duplex scanning....
Hmm... wondering how does this affect bleed-through?

Because, my main issue with sheetfed scanners is that
you cannot change the 'background' color.
Why an issue? well... depending on the type, age, color and
thickness of paper (especially magazines) sometimes
a white background to scan against is better,
but sometimes a black background helps better
to prevent bleed-through.

With a flatbed scanner you can change that background color easy
by using a piece of white or black cardboard or thick paper
(or any other color you wish to experiment with .

Does the S500 (or any other scanfed scanner for that matter)
have some special trick for this, or is this something that cannot
be solved? Or only in the high-end (high price models?

Of course, I haven't used a dedicated sheetfedscanner in about 5 years,
so improvements may have been made
For the moment my HP 7450 with ADF works (sort of...) for my
occasional sheetfed needs.

Regards,

E.

 

[Danny]

Hi Edward,

Yes, if the front and backside CCD's are slightly offset from one
another, they'd both have a sold background behind the peice of paper
giving a nice reflection for the CCD sensors to capture without seeing
data from the other side.

Combine that with a bright enough white light source and intelligent
software and you'll end up with image quality that will impress most. I
should clarify though- ADF scanners aren't designed for desktop
publishing scanners. They're for document imaging. Speed, image
quality, digitizing paper into electronic files, and extracting data
are the primary goals of highspeed ADF scanners.

Perfect replication of photos and other graphics are still better done
on flatbed devices.. If it's acceptable to have slight moire patterns
on the magazine images, then ADF scanners would be perfect. Moire is
going to occur eventually with any ADF scanner since there's no way
prevent slight skewing when feeding paper through an ADF. Descreening
looses it's effectivness if the original has any rotation...

I'll post a followup to this to illustrate better what I'm talking
about..

Thanks,

Danny Ha

 

[Edward Kroeze]

Hi Edward,

Yes, if the front and backside CCD's are slightly offset from one
another, they'd both have a sold background behind the peice of paper
giving a nice reflection for the CCD sensors to capture without seeing
data from the other side.

Combine that with a bright enough white light source and intelligent
software and you'll end up with image quality that will impress most. I
should clarify though- ADF scanners aren't designed for desktop
publishing scanners. They're for document imaging. Speed, image
quality, digitizing paper into electronic files, and extracting data
are the primary goals of highspeed ADF scanners.

Highspeed is not the goal I am looking for. Unattended use is.
My primary use for them would to generate TIF or PiNG files with them.
Mostly b/w (books) and greyscale (tax-related/financial documents)
and later perhaps color (comics, magazines) files
These files may or may not be processed at a later stage to JPG or PDF.
Or they might be processed with OCR to 'real' texts.

Perfect replication of photos and other graphics are still better done
on flatbed devices.. If it's acceptable to have slight moire patterns
on the magazine images, then ADF scanners would be perfect. Moire is
going to occur eventually with any ADF scanner since there's no way
prevent slight skewing when feeding paper through an ADF. Descreening
looses it's effectivness if the original has any rotation...

So... basically this means having a flatbed scanner on standby
for the jobs that the adf-scanner gives a less than acceptable result for

I'll post a followup to this to illustrate better what I'm talking
about..

Thanks for the information so far.

Regards,

Edward

 

[Ian]

Hi Edward,

Yes, if the front and backside CCD's are slightly offset from one
another, they'd both have a sold background behind the peice of paper
giving a nice reflection for the CCD sensors to capture without seeing
data from the other side.

Combine that with a bright enough white light source and intelligent
software and you'll end up with image quality that will impress most. I
should clarify though- ADF scanners aren't designed for desktop
publishing scanners. They're for document imaging. Speed, image
quality, digitizing paper into electronic files, and extracting data
are the primary goals of highspeed ADF scanners.

Perfect replication of photos and other graphics are still better done
on flatbed devices.. If it's acceptable to have slight moire patterns
on the magazine images, then ADF scanners would be perfect. Moire is
going to occur eventually with any ADF scanner since there's no way
prevent slight skewing when feeding paper through an ADF. Descreening
looses it's effectivness if the original has any rotation...

I'll post a followup to this to illustrate better what I'm talking
about..

Thanks,

Danny Ha

Thanks for your input Danny, one S500 on order.

Regards
Ian