Hello all!

I'm thinking of getting a scanner, and I'm having trouble figuring out which one to get. I'd kind of like to get one that's separate from a printer, but there's reasons that might be desirable too.

Basically I'm looking for something that scans quickly. Speed is most important to me, more important even than quality. A document feeder would be nice as well.

The other thing I'd like is something that doesn't seem to be in any standalone scanner: networking. Whether wired or wireless, it doesn't seem like you can get networking in a scanner, which seems strange to me. If anything, a scanner is more important to network than a printer. You have to make two trips to a scanner (one to put the document on, another to take it off) vs one to a printer.

Anyway, do you have any recommendations for fast scanners? And if you've ever seen a networked scanner (for under $300), that would be great too.

Lastly, if there's a small, light, inexpensive (but still fast) scanner that could be slung from computer to computer in a home, that would be good too.

Define "fast."

I'm pretty happy with my Canon LiDE220 for A$127. It is faster than the 110 which is why I paid a few extra bucks. Not that I scan a lot of things but slower would be annoying enough.

It does have some buttons to do auto scanning and printing but I haven't ever bothered with the Canon bloatware to make them work. Still needs a PC of course to do all that. Single USB connection so easy to move around.

I haven't seen a standalone networked scanner in my travels - always the all in one solutions.

One thing is that it depends on what sort of scanning you want to do. If it's images, photos, that sort of thing, you really want a scanner optimised for the job. If it's documents, like printed paper, bills, etc, it's really a different animal entirely.

For photos, I can certainly recommend the Epson V700 photo scanner. I have one of these, and the image quality is fantastic, both for reflective and transmissive media. The only thing I have seen that is better is a dedicated film scanner such as the Nikon ones, and they're several thousand dollars more. It's also very fast, as it has a firewire interface. At lower resolutions it's really very quick indeed, and higher resolutions it produces amazingly detailed output. It may be outside your budget, but the lower spec ones such as the V500 office or V500 photo scanner might be more suitable. I don't have personal experience of these models.

For documents I can recommend one of the Fujitsu Scansnap scanners. I picked up the predecessor to this one from ebay, brand new, for about £120, or perhaps $190 in US monies. It has a reliable document feeder, and duplex scans pages at high resolution in about 10 seconds per page. If you wind the resolution down a bit it will feed a page through in less than half that. The output is an indexable PDF file.

The unit is also quite small and light, and very portable. I believe the newer model is somewhat quicker.

The V500 office might also be worth looking at for document scanning, as it also has ADF.

pca

We have several networked scanners at work. Document feeders, up to tabloid size. Automatically email's the results.

Edit: but not <$300 I'm sure.

I highly recommend the Fujitsu fi-6130. (There are probably newer models now) It is compact (5" by 10.5" footprint), connects by USB, has a bullet-proof document feeder, and is blazingly fast, scanning both sides of a sheet of paper simultaneously, at a rate of 30 pages (60 images) per minute at 300dpi resolution. (resolutions up to 1200dpi are available and slower.) I used a fi-6120 (one model earlier than mine) to scan 176,512 images (probably about 120,000 individual pages) of medical records over a period of several months, and other than installing a maintenance kit to replace worn feed rollers, it was 100% trouble-free.

It is probably less than optimal for photographs (it's OK, but SWMBO's Epson flatbed does a better job with color fidelity and saturation) but for document scanning it's hard to beat.

The downside is that it cannot do flatbed scanning (document feeder only) and it is just a bit over your $300 budget. Like, $500-$600 over. I paid $869 for mine, and have never regretted it for an instant.

tanstaafl.

For documents the scansnap is excellent. I had a 6120 and apart from not being mac compatible it was great (I now have some mac compatible variant, not the latest, but it works well and comes with semi-decent software to produce OCR'ed PDFs).

However, for the office I got a Canon MX882 which is an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax. Duplex printing, duplex scanning (document feeder or flatbed), ethernet and wifi. Not as fast as the scansnap, and no OCR software for free, but you can't argue with $130 from Costco.

You can scan over the network or even scan direct to a memory card/USB stick - saving as PDF - without a computer being involved at all.

It's also built like a tank which is a bit surprising for the money.

The new Doxie. Doesn't require a computer at all to scan. Can fit it in some pockets. Scans to an SD card. iOS connection kit coming out, and an Android app can't be far behind (for devices that have USB ports).

That's what I'm getting next and it'll be my most used scanner for typical documents and receipts.

Unfortunately it's missing WiFi, otherwise it would be an "11/10" - you have to dock it via USB to unload the scanned images. Or pull the SD card and stick that into another device.

Thanks, guys. I'm looking at the devices you've recommended. Most are way beyond the price I'm looking for (like double or more)

I'll take a look at Doxie, Bruno. That's very interesting. That might be good for me, but this question is more for someone else.

To respond to Mark, I can't really say what "fast" would be. 20ppm or better?

I don't think any of the scanners thus far in this thread even come close to 20ppm. That's 3-seconds per scan.

A (really) quick hit of Google reveals 20ppm scanners for about £350, but going up to $1200.

So 20 ppm is not beyond the realms of possibility.

I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap which is quite heavily used, and I can't recommend it enough. Set up, stick some paper in, hit the big green button and it feeds through a pile of paper scanning both sides and out come OCR'd PDFs. Can't really fault the hardware or the software and it is very fast.

You can get the S1500 (Windows) for £299 +Tax in the UK and is does 20ppm duplex.

Just having a look around, looks like they have a Networked one as well! Pretty cool. It has what looks like some kind of big tablet style touchscreen on it and looks like it can dump PDFs/JPGs/TIFFs to a network share, FTP, SharePoint, Cloud, Email, Fax, Printer... and the option of buying the SDK! All for the low low price of 4x the S1500.

My fi-6130 does 30 ppm...duplex. That's 2-seconds per page, 1-second per scanned image.

tanstaafl.

Wow.. that's amazing!

See attached.

Now, to be fair, that is a 300x300 dpi scan in black and white. If I scan in 24-bit color, it goes about that fast for the first few pages, then slows down dramatically as something, somewhere (scanner? computer?) apparently runs out of cache or memory or ??

Still, for scanning documents it is hard to beat. As I said, I scanned nearly 200,000 images, and doing that at 10 seconds each would not have been enjoyable.

tanstaafl.

20ppm was a very rough guess. Compared to the speed one of the people I know is getting right now, I think 2ppm would be an improvement...