Looking for reasonably fast, economical sheet-fed scanner

[Larry]

I have a Lexmark X 125 (don't laugh) which I've been using to scan
credit card statements, etc. but it is quite slow and has a tendency
to misfeed, grabbing 6 sheets at a time to shove them through. The
image quality is fine for this application.

Fujitsu Scansnap S500 seems to be highly recommended, and could be got
for about $350.
HP Scanjet 5590 looks OK, best deal I saw was $269.

I have a flatbed for doing color/high res stuff (which I hardly ever
need), I just need something that will create reasonable copies of
statements, fast and not cost > $400, I think this is the most I can
really pay.

It would be really really great too if the software (or SOME available
software) could do things like:

Assemble multi-page statements into 1 document TIFF/PDF.
Do (even semi-manual) OCR to name the documents according to WHAT THEY
ARE, e.g. Discover_Card_April_2007.pdf would be great. I wrote a
Visual basic program to help me rename scanned images quickly but even
that is really time consuming and time is what I don't have enough of
to spend on that.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Gary

 

[Barry Watzman]

Factory refurb HP 5590's (in HP factory sealed boxes) were available on
E-Bay for $80 but may be gone now. The problem with them is that the HP
scanning software for them is crap. The older HP software for the
5470/5490 (HP PrecisionScan Pro) was MUCH better.

 

[Ian]

I have a Lexmark X 125 (don't laugh) which I've been using to scan
credit card statements, etc. but it is quite slow and has a tendency
to misfeed, grabbing 6 sheets at a time to shove them through. The
image quality is fine for this application.

Fujitsu Scansnap S500 seems to be highly recommended, and could be got
for about $350.
HP Scanjet 5590 looks OK, best deal I saw was $269.

I have a flatbed for doing color/high res stuff (which I hardly ever
need), I just need something that will create reasonable copies of
statements, fast and not cost > $400, I think this is the most I can
really pay.

It would be really really great too if the software (or SOME available
software) could do things like:

Assemble multi-page statements into 1 document TIFF/PDF.
Do (even semi-manual) OCR to name the documents according to WHAT THEY
ARE, e.g. Discover_Card_April_2007.pdf would be great. I wrote a
Visual basic program to help me rename scanned images quickly but even
that is really time consuming and time is what I don't have enough of
to spend on that.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Gary

I have the S500, and like it. My wife was sufficiently impressed that
she bought one for her use at her University.
Assembling multi-page documents is trivial (you get full Acrobat),
but I've no idea how you would go about your naming requirement.
The default naming just puts the date and time of the scan. I do the
OCR as a background task, so at the name calling time there's no
information available to the software to do anything smarter. Doing
OCR during the scan would slow things down dramatically.

Regards
Ian

 

[Larry]

Thanks for your input - I just ordered the S500. The program I wrote
has a bunch of selections for the accounts, and a calendar so that you
can select the statement date, and "page x of n" for multi-page (so if
the thing assembles a 10 page statement into a single PDF then that's
great). I just realized, that e.g. my bank always puts the date info
in the same place, credit card statements do the same thing, so a
reasonably smart program could look for info in certain locations,
determine what was there, etc. etc. do it all automatically. I guess
the drawback in today's world is that OCR is still pretty advanced
science, and you can't get an OCR function library (i.e.DLL/OCX) to
write your own programs for less than many hundreds of $$$. Which
means I'm probably not going to buy one because #1 I am not a
brilliant sw engineer, I just play one on TV, and #2 with my work and
4 yr old twins I am not bursting with spare time either.

Cheers,

Gary

 

[dennis@home]

Factory refurb HP 5590's (in HP factory sealed boxes) were available on
E-Bay for $80 but may be gone now. The problem with them is that the HP
scanning software for them is crap. The older HP software for the
5470/5490 (HP PrecisionScan Pro) was MUCH better.

I use one of those.
It works well with PaperPort Office using the commercial TWAIN drivers of
the HP site.
It doesn't come with those drivers on the disk.

I don't bother with naming the credit card statements, etc. I just put them
in different directories.
The search facility works well too.

 

[sales]

I have a Lexmark X 125 (don't laugh) which I've been using to scan
credit card statements, etc. but it is quite slow and has a tendency
to misfeed, grabbing 6 sheets at a time to shove them through. The
image quality is fine for this application.

FujitsuScansnapS500seems to be highly recommended, and could be got
for about $350.
HP Scanjet 5590 looks OK, best deal I saw was $269.

I have a flatbed for doing color/high res stuff (which I hardly ever
need), I just need something that will create reasonable copies of
statements, fast and not cost > $400, I think this is the most I can
really pay.

It would be really really great too if the software (or SOME available
software) could do things like:

Assemble multi-page statements into 1 document TIFF/PDF.
Do (even semi-manual) OCR to name the documents according to WHAT THEY
ARE, e.g. Discover_Card_April_2007.pdf would be great. I wrote a
Visual basic program to help me rename scanned images quickly but even
that is really time consuming and time is what I don't have enough of
to spend on that.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Gary

The S500 is without doubt great value for money with ADF, Duplex, A3
Scanning, Adobe Acrobat V7 & OCR software all for around £240!

Jason
www.bmisolutions.co.uk