I’ve accumulated tons of paper, and automated scanner technology keeps getting better and better. I’m thinking about creating a “Scanner club.” This club would purchase a high-end document scanner, ideally used on eBay. This would be combined with other needed tools such as a paper cutter able to remove the spines off bound documents (and even less-loved books) and possibly a dedicated computer. Then members of the club would each get a week with the scanner to do their documents, and at the end of that period, it would be re-sold on eBay, ie. a “ReBay.” The cost, divided up among members, should be modest. Alternately the scanner could be kept and time-shared among members from then on.

A number of people I have spoken to are interested, so recruiting enough members is no issue. The question is, what scanner to get? Document scanners can range from $500 for a “workgroup” scanner to anywhere from $1,500 to $10,000 for a “production” scanner. (There are also $100,000 scanning-house scanners that are beyond the budget. The $500 units are not worth sharing and are more modest in ability.

My question is, what scanner to get? As you go up in price, the main thing that changes is speed in pages per minute. That’s useful, but for private users not the most important attribute. (What may make it important is that if you need to monitor the scanning job to fix jams or re-feed. Then speed makes a big difference.)

To my mind the most important feature is how automatic the process is — can you put in a big stack of papers and come back later? This means a scanner which is very good at not jamming or double-feeding, and which handles papers of different sizes and thicknesses, and can tolerate papers that have been folded. My readings of reviews and spec sheets show many scanners that are good at detecting double feeds (the scanner grabs two sheets) as well as detecting staples, but the result is to stop and fix by hand. But what scanners require the least fixing-by-hand in the first place?

All the higher end units scan both sides in the same pass. Older ones may not do colour. Other things you get as you pay more will be:

• Bigger input hoppers — up to around 500 sheets at a time. This seems very useful.
• Higher daily duty cycles, for all-day scanning.
• Staple detectors (stops scan) and ultrasonic double feed detectors (also stop scan.)
• Better, fancier OCR (generating searchable PDFs) including OCR right in the hardware.
• Automatic orientation detection
• Ability to handle business cards. Stack up all those old business cards!
• The VRS software system, a high end tool which figures out if the document needs colour, grayscale or threshold, discards blank pages or blank backs and so on.
• In a few cases, a CD-burner so can be used without computer.
• Buttons to label “who” a document is being scanned for (can double as classification buttons.)
• Ability to scan larger documents. (Most high-end seem to do 11” wide which is enough for me.)

One thing I haven’t seen a lot of talk about is easy tools to classify documents, notably if you put several documents in a stack. At a minimum if would be nice if the units recognized a “divider page” which could be a piece of coloured paper or a piece of paper with a special symbol on it which means “start new document.” One could then handwrite text on this page to have it as a cover page for later classification at the computer, or if neatly printed, OCR is not out of the question. But even just a sure-fire way to divide up the documents makes sense here. Comments suggest such tools are common.

It may be that the most workable solution is to hire teen-agers or similar to operate the scanner, fix jams and feed and classify documents. At the speeds of these scanners (as much as 100 pages/minute for the higher end) it seems there will be something to do very often.

Anyway, anybody have experience with some of the major models and comments on which are best? The major vendors include Canon, Xerox Documate/Visioneer, Fujitsu, Kodak, Bell and Howell and Panasonic.