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GCN Home > 07/21/08 issue

Scans without jams

GCN Lab review: Sonar-equipped Panasonic scanner handles any kind of document on any kind of paper

By Trudy Walsh

DOLPHINS USE IT to find undersea mines. Bats use it to keep from crashing into cave walls. So why can’t we use sonar to navigate the pitfalls of document scanning?

Ultrasonic sensors are one of the features of the powerful Panasonic KV-S4085C scanner that make it speed through scanning jobs faster than Flipper can jump through the hoops at SeaWorld.

The KV-S4085C’s three ultrasonic sensors bounce sound waves off of documents and can discern a staple, bent page or a double-feed — two or more pieces of paper coming through at once — from almost an arm’s length away.

Image: GCN
Weighing in at 51 pounds and selling for $23,995, the KV-S4085C is not for the casual user who scans an occasional family photo to post on her Facebook page. This is a heavy-duty machine for when you have a lot to scan and you want high-quality images.

The KV-S4085C can handle wide pages or wallet-sized photos. Its feeder tray can hold as many as 300 sheets of paper. Depending on the selected resolution and type of document, it can scan as many as 85 portrait pages per minute.

The KV-S4085C has two other kinds of sensors: an optical sensor array that detects staples and interrupts the scanning process before damage can occur and a mechanical slip-detection sensor that automatically adjusts the height of the scanner’s auto document-feeding hopper to accommodate variations in document thickness. The paper tray rises to the exact level it needs to feed the document into the scanner, like a little elevator for your documents.

Bob Curci, a Panasonic product manager, said the sensors on the scanner’s Toughfeed paper-feed mechanism can sense “whether or not the paper is moving. If the paper isn’t moving, the roller won’t be turning.”

When the scanner detects a staple, a red indicator light flashes. It stops the rolling action before the staple can scratch the scanner’s glass. During testing, the scanner’s sensors detected a staple located at the opposite end of the page that was being fed into the scanner, a distance of 11 inches.

More news on related topics: Content / Record Management, Hardware