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GCN Home > 08/28/06 issue

Panasonic’s jack-of-all-scanners

GCN Lab Review | Fast, secure device wipes images clean after every scan.

By John Breeden II, GCN Staff

Some products try to do everything and end up accomplishing nothing. The new Panasonic KV-S1025C scanner is not one of those products.

The tiny 7.8-inch tall by 12.5-inch wide frame hides an incredible performance engine capable of scanning up to 26 pages per minute.

In our tests, even mixed-media documents that were heavy on graphics ran through the scanner at more than 20 pages per minute. And it can scan documents that are up to 100 inches long, meaning medical records and other odd-sized documents can be fed through.

Besides being extremely fast, the KV-S1025C is also accurate. We tried several things to either trick it or slow it down, but found that the Panasonic engineers had programmed the little scanner to compensate. For example, when scanning several pages of text we “accidentally” slipped a blank page into the middle of the document. The KV-S1025C was smart enough to automatically remove the blank page from the output.

Also, there’s a double-exposure feature that means when you’re scanning a double-sided document, you just need to let the scanner know. It can look at both sides at the same time then automatically place both images on the same page. For scanning ID cards and licenses, this is a must-have feature.

Built-in intelligence

You don’t even have to bother sorting documents by size. Throw in a business card, a normal piece of paper, a legal-size document and a bank check into the scanner at the same time and they’ll all get scanned and put together correctly in your output file. The scanner will crop the images down to their correct sizes without a bunch of wasted background space and also deskew them in case there are any problems. We ran 60 different-sized papers and cards through the scanner and found only two slight errors in all the output generated.

Accuracy was simply incredible. We found the KV-S1025C could even capture hologram images, including ones that aren’t supposed to be picked up by a scanner. If you put your American Express card through the system, even the shiny silver strip that says “American Express World Service” gets recorded.

More news on related topics: Hardware, IT Security



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