For the past decade I've used a typical corporate document scanner. These are the big brothers of the home "MFC" - laser printer, copier, scanner, fax machine. The scanner produces PDF images on an internal hard drive. You can adjust resolution and page size from a control panel, but really all we ever do is scan to 8.5x11 PDF archive resolution.
It's old tech. So why can't I buy a decent document scanner that produces 600DPI 8.5x11 PDFs without an attached computer? In particular, since Fujitsu seems to rule the home document scanning world, why does the ix500 still require an attached computer? This isn't rocket science.
Brother did something like this on a home MFC back in 2009, but I can't find anything on it today.
This is so weird. Is there a patent problem?
It's driving me daft.
See also
- Document Management and Scanning for the Home Intranet and Browser-based Thin Client Browsers 1999. I'm just including this for historic purposes, but it reminds me how long I've been working this problem. In those days it wasn't yet clear that all scans would be to PDF; it took some hackery to produce PDFs from a Fujitsu 15C. That was a nice scanner, but enormous.
- My ScanSnap S1300 document scanner review 2010. I liked it at first, but document feeders are everything. This one wasn't good enough. I'd have been far happier with the S1500 of the same vintage.
- Discarding receipts: IRS accepts scanned images 2/2006
- Microsoft Office Document Imaging - a little known gem 5/2008 - Windows. TIFF output though.
- Image Capture for Scanning: the 2nd most underestimated OS X application 9/2007 and Image Capture 10.6 is one heck of a scanning app 12/2009. Apple hasn't ruined it yet.
- Brother MFC machine scan to USB features 4/2009. So why didn't Fujitsu do this?!
- Epson vs. Canon scanners: who has better OS X support 9/2007: It's all about the drivers, Canon drivers are horrendous. (HP might be worse.)
- ScanHelper: route scan output to the desired application 3/2007
- Streamlining Receipt Entry | Scott Gruby's Blog 2012
