Production Document Scanners

For High Volume Scanning

Every day, many millions of pages are captured by production document scanners - hardware designed to scan page after page, all day long, every day. To qualify as a production scanner, the device must have a sheet feeder. That saves you time by automatically taking the next available piece of paper and pushing it into the scanner. Production scanners range from low-volume, usually 10 to 25 pages per minute, to medium volume capable of 25 to 75 pages per minute, to high volume at 75 to 150 pages a minute, and all the way to very high volume units that run above 150 pages a minute.

 

Scanner Duty Cycles

However fast your scanner is, you need to make sure that it can handle the volume of paper you intend to throw into it. Let's assume you have a medium volume of pages to process on average, say 3000 per day. Considering that even a twenty-five page a minute scanner is theoretically capable of scanning 1500 pages an hour, that means you should be able to scan your required volume pages in two hours. But hold on, you know perfectly well that even if the scanner can go 25 pages a minute, that does not mean that you can run it non-stop for 120 minutes to push 3000 images through. Just like the neat new digital copier down the hall, you have to assume that there will be jams, time to reload paper, etc. A rule of thumb is that actual production will be somewhere between 50 and 75% of flatout scanner speed. OK, so your 25 page a minute scanner should do the job in four hours, right? Well maybe, for a day, or week, or even a couple of months. But is that scanner built to handle that volume? Will it start to need constant servicing? Most scanner manufacturers publish the duty cycle for each scanner, i.e. the maximum page volume they can process per day or month.

WARNING: if your usage consistently exceeds the published duty cycle, you may find your annual maintenance contract will not cover the necessary repairs. Moral of the story: give yourself some breathing room - purchase scanners with a duty cycle that is at least 25% higher than you think your peak usage will be in the coming year!

 

Production Document Scanners

There's no problem finding a scanner that meets your needs, because several manufacturers are poised to fill in every possible production and feature level. These are the main vendors you should consider:

Bowe Bell + Howell Mid to High End scanners, including color.

Fujitsu A full range of scanners, including high end scanners running at almost 100 pages per minute.

IBML - High end and very high end, full-featured scanners.

Kodak - Wide range of scanners with many options and features.

Ricoh - in addition to their popular copier hardware, Ricoh provides scanners in the low and medium range.

 

MFDs and Me!

Many offices already have capable document scanners - only they aren't called scanners, they're called "digital copiers," or, reflecting their multiple personalities, Multi-Function Devices (MFDs). An MFD is a copier, of course. Although it may look a lot like a copier from five or ten years ago, they are really digital scanners attached to high-speed laser printers. When equipped with a network interface, these devices can also be networked printers or networked scanners. If you're volume is modest - say in a remote office that has a hundred pages to scan a day - you don't necessarily need to buy a scanner to capture those images. Consider instead the MFD (making sure it is equipped with a network interface), and start scanning. Datacap offers several ways to move those images into the capture environment.

 

Selecting A Document Scanner

There are lots of scanners on the market, how do you choose the best for you? Speed and duty cycle are obvious criteria. But there are also loads of other features that you may want to consider.

• Bottom or top feeder - A bottom feeder takes paper from the bottom of the stack and allows you to add more while it is running. Top feeders are much more common and generally have simpler sets of rollers and feeders.
• Imprinter - If you want every page that goes through the scanner to have a unique number printed right on it, then get a scanner with an imprinter. Not every scanner has one, and they are always an extra-cost add on. When evaluating scanners with imprinters, don't forget to find out the cost of new print cartridges - a low cost imprinter with high-cost cartridges may make it very uneconomical to operate over time.
• Flatbed - Although a production scanner, by definition, has a sheet feeder. Many of the mid-range scanners have both. When you run into a crinkled sheet of paper that stubbornly resists the sheet feeder, or when the page has been torn or otherwise cannot be fed through the feeder, a flatbed comes in handy. And don't forget to get software that knows how to handle both the feeder and flatbed!

Connecting Your Document Scanner

An optical scanner is a device that is connected to a personal computer. Almost all production scanners now use a SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy") interface. That's because the latest SCSI 3 specification is very fast, capable of handling a blur of images from a high-end scanner. Since most computers do not come with a SCSI interface, it is something you need to add.

There are two main vendors of SCSI interfaces that are used in document imaging:

Adaptec

Kofax

You'll need a SCSI adapter card that plugs into the scan PC, a SCSI cable with the right connectors for your scanner, and a software interface. In addition to the physical connection between the computer and scanner (SCSI adapter and cable), software is required to "drive" the scanner.

Scanner Software Interfaces

There are three popular software interfaces used to drive a production scanner. They provide mostly the same functionality, but are not all available with all scanners supporting all scanner features. In other words, once you have selected a scanner and appropriate options, you need to find out which software interface fully supports what you are looking to do! Of course, once you have done that, you need to select the capture software that will take advantage of the interface, adaptor and scanner. The three software interfaces are:

ISIS - A proprietary scanner interface from Pixel Translations.

Kofax - The same people who make the Kofax Adrenaline SCSI cards have a software interface called Image Controls. For most scanners, Kofax now runs "on top of" ISIS. In other words, the underlying feature set is delivered by ISIS.

TWAIN - A public domain interface with growing popularity. Comes with many scanners now.

Note: Both Kofax and ISIS have the ability to run TWAIN on top of their interfaces. TWAIN often cannot take full advantage of more advanced features in a scanner.