Please feed me! - comparison of four sheet-fed scanners from Logitech, Visioneer, UMAX Technologies and Fujitsu - includes related articles on the Primax DataPen and the operations of Visioneer's PaperPort - Hardware Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, August, 1995 by Russell Letson

THE PAPERLESS OFFICE IS STILL A MYTH. IF YOU'RE LIKE most entrepreneurs, you receive all sorts of paper documents, from letters, contracts, and business cards to newspaper articles, magazines, and bills. Such matter contains the raw material for improved correspondence, sharper presentations, and new business leads. The problem is, most of your work is done on the computer and the useful information resides on those slips of paper.

You've gotten around these drawbacks in a number of ways. When you want to excerpt a book or a contract, you type it in. You print out new business pitches and stack them in the fax machine along with copies of newspaper articles. For hours at a time, you sit in front of your contact manager adding addresses from business cards collected at trade shows. And you resort to clip art images that don't adequately relay your messages when the perfect picture is in your photo album.

What's needed here is some way to scan those pieces of paper into your computer. Once you've gathered them onto your hard drive, you can fax them out, convert them to editable text, import their addresses to your PIM, or pull their graphics into a presentation. Software, whether fax management, graphics, or optical character recognition (OCR), increases your productivity.

Although scanners are several years old, they've yet to become a necessity for anyone except graphic arts professionals who have suffered through their deficiencies to get the right image. Handheld scanners' low cost and small size become irrelevant when their precision relies on the steadiness of your hand. Flatbed models are precise but carry big price tags and consume large amounts of desk space.

Fortunately, there's a new category of scanners: the sheet-fed. Called everything from wiener scanners to convenience scanners, they're small enough to fit on your desk, considerably easier to use than handhelds, and a fraction of the cost of flatbed models. Sheet-fed scanners offer good enough resolution for black-and-white graphics and line art, but where they really shine is with text documents that you intend to fax out to clients or pull into your word processor through OCR software.

All of the scanners we looked at either link to existing fax software or provide their own. What makes them better than a simple addition to your fax arsenal, though, are links to other applications that can use scanned input. Once you've had an OCR program save you an hour of retyping, you won't give it up. In conjunction with Windows's Paintbrush, the new scanners let you add your company logo to faxes from your word processor. We were also intrigued by the prospects for software that "reads" business cards and imports their information to a PIM.

Down the line, the small-scale document-management features included with these devices promise a more electronic office--even though it won't be completely paperless. Two of these scanners include markup and editing abilities in their main applications that allow you to put comments on documents, draw arrows on them, highlight and circle parts, or paste a table from one document to another. Unlike Post-it notes attached to your paper documents, you can search your electronic notes for ones marked, say, New Business. Still, electronic files take a lot of disk space, so you'll have to wait for multigigabyte hard drives to store large numbers of electronic documents.

On a more practical note, sheet-fed scanners turn your printer into a copier: Just print the scanned image. In other words, these products match the features of the multifunction printer-fax-copiers we reviewed in May 1995. Where multifunction peripherals combine everything in one box, however, the new sheet-fed scanners provide the missing element of scanning to anyone with a fax/modem and printer. Why duplicate hardware that you already have?

What to Look For Each of the four machines we reviewed has a minimum scan quality of 200dpi, which is sufficient for faxes. OCR works best at 300dpi and up, so every unit except Visioneer's PaperPort provides this level of image quality. Visioneer uses software to boost its 200dpi scanner to 400dpi. Note that 300dpi is a good match for copying, since that is the resolution of most laser printers. The ability to do grayscale or halftone scanning is useful if you're going to be dealing with photo-quality graphics.

If you already have an adapter installed or don't mind poking around the interior of your computer, a SCSI hardware connection generally gives the fastest performance. A parallel-to-SCSI adapter trades some speed for plug-in convenience, and direct parallel and serial connections are even more convenient, because you don't have to make any changes to your computer's operating system to use them.

Software is another matter. If you've used a scanner before, you might want to look for TWAIN-compliant drivers to pull documents straight into such TWAIN-compliant applications as the leading desktop publishing programs. Some graphics programs also support the slightly less common ISIS standard.