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
4 comments:
Honestly, I don't care, I need the power of Adobe Acrobat to improve and OCR my scans anyway … :)
Your question is on the other hand fully understandable … and a standalone document scanner would be very useful at home. At the moment, I scan all my private documents at the office and that's less than ideal of course.
Do you know by chance if the ix500 got a better document feeder than the S1500? In the S1500 feeder, documents often lean to the front (because they arrived folded in half) and I have to push them back by hand. Paper jams occur too often as well …
Hi Martin -- I saw this comment but not the notification. So now I have to figure out where they are going. Maybe into spam, but I rely more on the RSS feed to let me know.
Google seems kind of broken these days.
Our app.net colleagues did say the ix500 feeder is nicely improved over the S1500, which was itself MUCH better than the s1300.
Durability might still be an issue. Most reviews are based on only cursory testing if at all … I would like to know how the ix500 feeder copes with 15'000 scanned pages.
I had originally planned to buy a S1300 for home use but it was not convincing enough. I am also still skeptical about the ix500 – the S1500 gets still successfully sold at almost the same price …
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