Our guest blogger today is the "Docudude" -- Amila Hendahewa. Amila is CTO at Sanje Lanka Ltd, an ECM solutions provider in Sri Lanka. His specialties include document capture, OCR, project costing and management, and SharePoint. An experienced document imaging consultant, Amila is certified with CDIA+ and PMP and also holds MCTS on Sharepoint. You may contact Amila via e-mail at amila.hendahewa@live.com or follow him on twitter @docudude. His blog can be found at http://www.docudude.com.
8 Things to Consider in Selecting the Right Scanner
1. Scanning speed
Most of the times when we are presenting a solution to a client, there is one question that always pops up -- What is the speed of your scanner? Almost everyone thinks that the higher the speed of the scanner, the higher the output.
My personal opinion is that this is not so all the time. Beyond a certain level, the scanner will be idle due to the inability to feed documents at that speed. Especially when scanning mixed documents it is not possible to use the scanner to the full speed. The scanning speed is measured either in ppm (pages per minute) for simplex scanners or ipm (images per minute) for duplex scanners. Today there are scanners ranging from 20 ppm to 200 ppm.
Unless the purchaser is an internal or external service bureau (or a similar operation of scanning very high volumes of the same document type), the lower speed ranges are likely sufficient for many.
2. Document size (maximum & minimum)
One of the main factors that decide the price of a scanner is the maximum size of a document that can be scanned.
Generally there are scanners which can scan either up to:
- A4 / legal
- A3
- larger than A3
Most of the documents that we get are either in A4 or legal size. But in practice I prefer to go for a A3 scanner, since there are lot of non standard size documents. Also there are few scanners that can scan extra long documents
3. Feeder -- Flat bed / ADF
Production scanners come either with the Auto feeder only or with the flatbed. Some new scanner models have a detachable flatbed which could be very ergonomic depending on the work layout. A flatbed is required if you need to scan bound documents, books, fragile or very delicate documents as well as files without separating papers etc.
Especially when it comes to scanning of legal documents such as contracts or deeds a flatbed may be required since these come in double legal size and cannot be separated.
4. Simplex / Duplex
Most of the today’s scanners are duplex; meaning that it can scan both sides of the document at the same time. Unless if you are specifically going to scan single sided documents, it is always better to go for a duplex scanner.
5. Scanning Mode - Color / B&W
There are 3 main output formats in document scanning:
- B&W / bitonal
- Gray scale
- Color
Most of today's scanners can scan in all 3 formats. However there could be models that do not support color scanning. There are some scanners that support dual stream outputs. That is, it can scan a color document and save 2 images in two formats at the same time (e.g., B&W and color).
6. Resolution (optical & output)
When it comes to selecting a scanner, (especially for high quality scanning) resolution is a main factor. There are two resolutions to consider.
Optical resolution: This represents the actual scanning resolution the scanner is capable of scanning. So this is the important measurement.
Output resolution: This is the enhanced or the maximum resolution that the scanner can produce using interpolation. Output resolution is always greater than the optical resolution. But It does not add more resolution but just enlarge the image by adding extra pixels artificially. So this is not an important measurement as the optical resolution.
7 . Drivers and capture software
Any of today’s scanner comes bundled with one or several scanning applications and drivers. There are a few things to consider here.
Drivers: there are two main sets of drivers, Twain and ISIS. Twain is an open and freely available set of drivers intended for consumer level scanners. ISIS is a proprietary standard recommended for high speed production scanners. Most of the scanners support both drivers. However if you intend to use a separate specialised capture application instead of the one that comes with the scanner, you need to check on the driver compatibility.
Output formats: The combination of the scanner and the capture application will decide what are the file types (TIFF, PDF, PDF/A, etc…) that can be produced.
Image enhancements : There are interesting and very useful image enhancement features associated with different scanners.
File saving options : Different scanners have different features on saving the scanned image such as the ability to directly scan in to SharePoint.
8. Specialized scanners and accessories
The last area to consider is whether you need specialised scanners such as:
- large format/high precision scanners
- specialized book scanners
- mobile scanners
- networked scanners
- check scanners /MICR readers
- High speed – high capacity
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Check out the AIIM seminar series next month -- coming to a city near you! Full list of cities HERE.
Some "8 things" entries that might be of interest...
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