Through a scanner quickly

The upsurge in document-scanner speeds is due to the implementation of a second reader head that lets the device scan both sides of a page at the same time. This eliminates the need for complicated mechanisms to turn the page around for a second scan or even to manually turn the stack of pages over for a second pass.

Of the seven scanners we tested, all but one had this configuration, which tells us that this is rapidly becoming a standard for document scanners.

Another development is one-touch buttons and preset scanner settings. With these in place, you don’t have to be an expert on the right amount of dots per inch, color balance or contrast to use the scanner; you don’

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Visioneer Patriot 470

All but one of our seven scanners had some sort of one-touch or preset scanning capability. This ability alone may be responsible for shortening lines at the scanner.

What we did
We gathered scanners from Epson America Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Eastman Kodak Co., Panasonic Corp., Visioneer Inc. and Xerox Corp. We were looking for desktop configurations, although that turned out to mean quite a difference in sizes.

We set each of the scanners up in turn, noting how easy or difficult each step was. Then we scanned a variety of documents, keeping an eye on color accuracy and image quality.

To determine the scanner’s speed, we used two 30-page one-sided documents. One was filled completely with black-and-white text, which we scanned at 300 dpi. The second was a mixture of text and graphics, which can give many printers fits. We scanned the second one at 600 dpi. In each case we used scanner software that came with

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Kodak Scan Station 100