What You Need to Know About Document Scanners
When in the market for a new scanner, many buyers immediately look at speed and maximum resolution because these are the specifications they’re familiar with on the printers and MFPs they already own, but these really aren’t the most important aspects of a scanner. Worse yet, many organizations aren’t even aware of the benefits that the right scanning solution can provide.
Why Document Scanning?
Forget hunting for documents in rows of filing cabinets, making photocopies and faxing them out to remote workers. Document scanning allows workers to integrate documents directly into their electronic workflows. This lets workers find documents with text searches, restrict access with password protection, share files with other workers via e-mail and clear out all those paper folders that take up so much space in the office.
Jackie Horn, director of worldwide marketing for BÖWE BELL + HOWELL, pointed out particular markets where scanning solves many problems. “Paper-intensive industries, such as financial services, insurance, legal, healthcare and government, must contend with enormous volumes of paper in varying sizes, colors and thicknesses,” she told BLI. “Managing, retrieving and transferring these documents can be difficult, time-consuming and costly.”
“Capturing documents quickly, competently, and with the requisite image quality provides fast and accurate access to shared information for everyone in the business,” said Don McMahan, vice president of sales for document imaging at Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group. “This equates to easier collaboration throughout the organization and, more importantly, a shortened time of information retrieval.”
Electronic documents provide greater security features, such as digital signatures to ensure which employees created files and audit trails to check which people are sending and receiving them. McMahan said, “Document capture mitigates potential risks to businesses. With information readily and easily available, decisions are made based on the most recent data, which makes auditing and complying to record management guidelines and regulatory requirements, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act [SOX] and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act [HIPAA], a lot easier.”
Scanning paper documents into electronic files also makes businesses able to better compete in the market by providing faster access to information, which enhances customer service. That, in turn, increases customer satisfaction.
Essential Features
“Look beyond the usual parameters of ‘speeds and feeds,’” Horn said. She explained that businesses tend to get caught up in the specifications of the scanner, such as scan speed, which is measured in pages per minute (ppm) for single-sided scanning and images per minute (ipm) for double-sided scanning, and resolution, which is measured in dots per inch (dpi). However, they fail to weigh a device’s less quantifiable features. “Businesses need scanners that are simple to use, capture high-quality images and provide advanced features that match their requirements. Users should look for robust machines that can handle a wide array of document types as well as varying workloads,” said Horn.
Kodak’s McMahon agreed with Horn’s suggestion to look beyond the basic specifications. “While speeds and feeds continue to play a predominant factor in production scanning innovations,” he said, “technologies in ergonomics and user interface are also improving usability and productivity as well.”
Buyers need to strongly weigh features that improve efficiency by reducing the amount of time employees need to spend at a scanner. Ease of use is critical in this regard. Organizations need scanners that any employee can use without any kind of training from the IT manager.
In order to save workers time, a scanner should also be able to prevent mechanical errors that bog users down in technical issues instead of getting back to their real jobs. Ultrasonic multifeed detection is such a feature. This capability ensures that only one page of a document is fed through the scanner at once, thus eliminating paper jams. Similarly, missed-feed detection ensures that pages won’t slip past the scan element without being digitized, so workers won’t have to run them through a second time.
Andrew Ritschel, president of Electronic Office Systems, a New Jersey-based copier dealership that focuses largely on document management, said that the features that are important for document scanners are not only very different from the features that are important for consumer scanners, but they’re not nearly as apparent to most buyers, either. He said, “I’m selling customers a document scanner, not an image scanner. You can’t go to CDW or an office superstore and pick up a document scanner like you’d pick up a little consumer scanner.”
When asked about which features he discusses most frequently with his customers, Ritschel answered, “We’re talking about how much paper can be stacked in the paper feeder, does the scanner have simultaneous dual-side scanning, what is the speed, can it do 11" x 17", does it have a platen glass, what’s the volume and can it scan documents that are stapled or paper-clipped?”
This is a good time to be in the market for a scanner because high-end features have made their way into more mainstream models. “Desktop scanner end-users can expect production scanner performance in terms of image quality, document transport, ease of use, reliability, versatility and flexibility,” McMahan said. “Today’s workgroup and departmental desktop, or [as the industry calls them] distributed, scanners feature production scanner attributes, including top-notch illumination for shadow-free images, document feeders designed to minimize multi- and missed-feeds and document transport mechanisms that minimize static and increase the types of documents that can be scanned, including credit, ID and other hard surface small cards.”
The interface that scanners use to connect to a host PC is changing, as well. Previously, SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface, pronounced “skuzzy”) ports were common on document scanners, but instead, FireWire and USB 2.0 ports are now found on the lion’s share of these devices. Although FireWire and USB 2.0 ports don’t offer the same level of data throughput as SCSI, they’re fast enough to accommodate the scan speeds of all but the most high-end scanners, while reducing costs and offering compatibility with virtually any PC. In order for a PC to interface with a SCSI-based device, a separate SCSI controller must be installed in the PC, either as an integrated chip on high-end motherboards or as a PCI or PCI Express add-in card.
Additional Features
Beyond the essential features to consider, there are other functions that might prove valuable to an organization. John Dexter, director of business development at Visioneer, pointed out the benefit of a black scanning background instead of the typical white one—allowing the scanner to more easily find the edges of paper documents, which enables the scanner to more accurately scan documents of varying sizes. Unfortunately, this is a feature users will almost never find on a spec sheet, so to determine if a scanner has this, the buyer will need to ask the vendor or dealer.
Other welcome features are front-loading document feeders, which provide for the most convenient placement of originals to be scanned, as well as blank page detection, which automatically deletes any pages it scans that are blank, conserving storage resources. The ability to automatically detect whether pages are in color or monochrome and scanning them accordingly is very helpful, too, since a user doesn’t have to scan monochrome pages in a separate batch from color documents or manually choose the black or color scan setting. While a user could just set everything to scan in color, that would slow down the scan speed of black-and-white documents while also requiring more storage capacity.
Buyers should also consider maintenance, giving extra weight to scanners that make changing rollers and replacing bulbs a user-serviceable task that doesn’t require a service call. Most manufacturers will also offer a number of proprietary features in their scanners that allow for greater efficiency.
It’s also important to consider how some features, such as long document scanning, can be particularly useful in specific industries. For example, scanners with long document handling allow healthcare institutions to digitize long documents, such as fetal monitoring and electrocardiogram (EKG) strips, even if they’re hundreds or thousands of feet long. This eliminates the need for hospital workers to engage in the laborious process of trimming long documents or mounting them on 8.5" x 11" sheets before scanning.
Resolution Kills
Electronic Office System’s Ritschel cites resolution as one of the specifications on which buyers place too much emphasis when selecting a document scanner. “When you’re getting into document imaging, you’re using 200-dpi resolution. People think they have to go to higher resolutions, but they learn that higher resolution kills the scanning time and storage requirements,” he said.
A few models manage to scan documents at 300 dpi very quickly, however. BLI has also found that the file sizes of scanned images can in some cases double or more than double as the resolution is increased from 200 to 300 dpi, which is expected since the total number of sampled dots per square inch more than doubles (40,000 for 200 dpi and 90,000 for 300 dpi). Increasing the resolution also has very little impact on OCR performance. Many scanners provide resolutions up to 600 dpi, but BLI has found that there’s no significant benefit in scanning a document beyond 200 dpi for most general document scanning applications, although the increased resolution can capture photos with more detail. For some scanners BLI has tested, OCR performance actually drops when the resolution is increased from 200 to 300 dpi.
Finding the Right Scanner
Kodak’s McMahan recommended that buyers begin their search for the right scan solution by talking to a reseller. “In most situations, determining how document capture and document management systems can provide efficiency and productivity gains requires consultation with a value-added reseller,” he said. “These specialists know the latest in technology, how and where to apply it, and most importantly, how to assess increasing the efficiency of an end user’s current operation.”
In order to ensure that an organization is buying the most effective hardware for its environment, David Haining, product marketing manager for HP’s commercial Scanjets, offered several questions that buyers should ask themselves before deciding on a particular model.
First, the buyer needs to ask how many documents they’ll scan each day. If the answer is more than 50 or so, then “The speed and robustness of a scanner should be your main considerations. You should consider a dual-head duplex scanner with a high-capacity automatic document feeder [ADF] that operates at faster speeds [for both simplex and duplex modes]. You should also look for scanners that have a recommended daily scan volume that matches your requirements,” Haining said. For organizations that will scan a relatively small number of documents each day, scan speed and ADF capacity aren’t prime considerations.
Organizations will also have to note if the documents they’ll be scanning require special care. If a business is scanning nothing but 8.5" x 11" forms, for example, then a sheetfed scanner is all that’s needed since it provides the fastest scanning performance. If fragile, damaged, bound or particularly thin or thick documents need to be scanned, however, then a scanner that includes either an integrated or tethered flatbed scanner is essential. The Kodak i1440 is a good example of a departmental scanner with a fast ADF (75 PPM/150 IPM) and an optional tethered flatbed.
BLI Lab Technician Joe Ellerman brought up a feature that’s critical for many organizations: color dropout. This feature removes a particular color from a document during the scanning process so that the digital version shows a plain white background in place of whichever color was there originally. This greatly increases the ability of OCR software to read a document with a colored background. Ellerman warns, though, that “Some scanners can only drop out red, green or blue. With others I’ve tested, you could choose the precise color on a certain area of the scanned image that you want dropped out and the driver would match that color automatically.”
Dropping out a particular shade might be important to many buyers, but for others, the ability to drop out a more general color is really all they need. For that reason, many scanner manufacturers offer the ability to drop out either red, green or blue on some models, while being able to select a specific dropout color on others.
Buyers must determine whether document scanning will be performed by trained technicians or by knowledge workers, which are general office employees who work with the documents. If scanning will be performed by a scan technician, then manual control over scanning features through software or the scanner driver is important, as it will allow these trained workers to achieve the best results from the documents they scan.
If knowledge workers will be using the scanner, then one-touch buttons are critical. “A knowledge worker does not want to become deeply involved with the process of scanning,” said HP’s Haining. “Instead, they want to go up to a scanner and use it in a similar way as they would a copier—push the Start button and go. Features such as control panels with one-touch buttons allow the user to quickly get their scanning tasks done and move on to their normal job.”
One-Touch Buttons
One-touch buttons allow users to scan a document, perform OCR, convert it to a particular file format, and store it in a specific network folder—all at the touch of a single button. Most offices can get by very well with just a few of these buttons, but if users will need to scan into many different file formats and to a variety of destinations, then more buttons will be required.
Electronic Office Systems’ Ritschel thinks one-touch buttons are significant regardless of who’s performing the scanning because they provide such a productivity booster. “Whenever you’re buying a scanner, you’re always looking for one-touch functionality. It’s very important,” he said.
Ellerman agreed, saying, “I think one-touch buttons are extremely important since you can program them any way you prefer. For example, one button might scan to Word, one to Outlook and one to fax, so there’s no wasted time setting up the driver to match your needs.”
HP’s Haining pointed out an industry trend toward having office workers scan their own documents, which makes one-touch buttons increasingly important. “As the industry quickly moves from centralized scanning with scan technicians to distributed environments where knowledge workers are responsible for scanning documents, one-touch buttons are critical,” he said. “Workers want to use scanning to enhance their normal job, rather than have the process of scanning become their job. Therefore, one-touch buttons that allow knowledge workers to initiate the scan with the push of a button are critical for productivity.”
“One-touch buttons can be useful… Users who scan using the same or predictable settings can create distinct profiles and then select one of these profiles each time they scan,” said BÖWE BELL + HOWELL’s Horn, although she sees limits to the benefits of these buttons. “One-touch buttons may not be feasible in complex, production scanning environments where an operator may need to modify scanner settings frequently,” she noted.
McMahan sees one-touch buttons fading from the market for production scanners because of those devices’ growing capabilities. He said, “High-production scanners are beginning to integrate software and hardware to create complete scanning systems, versus standalone scanning hardware.”
Software
Software is integral to the performance of a scanner. “Scanners really have to be reviewed with their bundled software,” Visioneer’s Dexter told us. Despite that, however, software isn’t given much weight when comparing scanners.
Kofax VirtualReScan (VRS) is the most commonly used scan enhancement software. It automatically cleans up scanned images so that OCR can be more accurately performed, such as removing background colors or darkening light text without requiring numerous manual adjustments. Dexter explained the relationship between most document scanners and Kofax’s VRS. “VRS is a driver that works with any application, but sometimes there are blurred lines between hardware and the driver,” he said. “The scanner performs the rough scanning and VRS handles the processing, but with VRS, a scanner can claim more features, such as auto-crop and deskew, including those initiated with one-touch scanning. Kofax VRS is a big checklist item.”
The Basic version of VRS is bundled with many document scanners, almost completely eliminating the time users have to spend preparing a document for OCR by automatically cropping documents to their correct page sizes; deskewing images, which rotates them to the proper orientation; and despeckling them, which smoothes images to remove graininess.
For an additional cost, users can upgrade from VRS Basic to VRS Professional. BLI’s Ellerman said, “Most scanners that come with Kofax offer you the Basic version. But to use the more advanced functions, the Professional version must be purchased.”
Marni Carmichael, manager of OEM sales for Kofax, said, “Kofax VRS Professional adds many productivity-enhancing benefits, such as automatic color detection, a simple to use feature that produces very accurate results.” This color detection determines if a document contains only black-and-white text and/or graphics. If so, the page is scanned in monochrome, which increases scan speed, decreases storage requirements and improves OCR performance.
Other features included in VRS Professional are intelligent blank page deletion, which prevents the wasted scan time, storage requirements and general inconvenience of scanning and saving blank pages; Hole Fill, which removes the black holes that appear when a hole-punched document is scanned; and Advanced Clarity, which enhances detailed documents with small text such as prescriptions, in addition to documents with bold backgrounds or watermarks.
As convenient as all these features are, however, none of them is the most widely used tool in VRS Professional. Carmichael said, “We receive the most positive feedback from our customers regarding the automatic orientation feature, which eliminates the need to sort documents facing in the same direction. Through this feature, users can place documents in the feeder any way they choose—upside down, backwards, right or left—and they will be rotated automatically to the correct orientation [portrait or landscape].”
While VRS greatly enhances OCR performance, it’s not a substitute for a high-quality scanner. Horn said, “Advanced camera technologies and better image processing abilities help scanners ensure reliable capture and forms processing. And clean, sharp image quality helps ensure more accurate optical character recognition.”
Dexter wanted to clear any confusion about VRS and OCR. He noted that “drivers don’t perform OCR; they hand it off to software applications. Business card scanning is an example.” Ellerman thinks that’s an important point. “If you’re looking to keep a record of contacts from business cards, you would choose a scanner that comes with software that would file the names and numbers in your Outlook contact list. Different scanners come with different software so you would want to do research on the specific scanner to see what comes standard and what has to be purchased,” he said. For example, some scanners include NewSoft Presto! BizCard SE for business card scanning. Most vendors offer proprietary scan-enhancement software as well. “Image enhancement capability is a must,” said McMahan.
Drivers
In addition to this specialized software, scanners include one or more of three kinds of device drivers: TWAIN, ISIS or WIA. TWAIN is a free, open-source driver developed by the TWAIN Working Group in 1992 that can be customized by individual hardware manufacturers. As a result, TWAIN drivers will offer different capabilities and different levels of software integration depending on how the driver was modified by the manufacturer.
Although the phrase “Technology Without An Interesting Name” is frequently offered as the phrase that TWAIN stands for, in truth, TWAIN isn’t an acronym at all. Instead, it’s a reference to the passage in Rudyard Kipling’s The Ballad of East and West that reads “…and never the twain shall meet...” This alludes to the difficulty manufacturers had in enabling their scanners to communicate with PCs in the early 1990s when the TWAIN driver was developed. The TWAIN working group chose to write the name in all capital letters to make it appear more distinctive.
WIA (Windows Image Acquisition) was developed by Microsoft as an improvement on the Still Image Architecture (STI) that was released with Windows 98. Like ISIS, WIA is a standardized driver that offers the same functionality for any scanner that employs it, but WIA is free and available only for Windows operating systems.
Workgroup Versus Desktop Scanners
Organizations need to establish how many people will be scanning. If a small number of employees will each scan a large number of documents each day, then desktop scanners connected directly to those workers’ PCs is the most efficient solution. If it’s a large number of employees who will each scan comparatively few documents per day, Haining recommends “a shared network device with robust security capabilities.”
Workgroup scanners provide distributed scanning, which allows a wide range of employees in an office to scan documents from a central location. Its connection to the office network gives this type of device several key advantages. Kodak’s McMahan pointed out that, “They can simultaneously share scanned document files via e-mail, send files to network locations, fax, send via FTP, route to document management systems local or remote, save to local USB drives and print to networked printers.”
Electronic Office Systems’ Ritschel pointed out the efficiency of desktop scanners. “I have a scanner sitting next to my computer so when people tell me they’re looking for information from my office, I scan the brochures and send them as PDF files,” he said. He also pointed out that unlike desktop printers, there’s no additional consumables cost related to a personal scanner. Once you’ve paid the initial cost of the desktop scanner, it’s no less cost efficient to operate than a network scanner—the same can’t be said of a desktop printer, which provides a less efficient use of ink or toner, while also forcing the office to stock one more kind of printer cartridge.
Desktop scanners are generally better productivity boosters than desktop printers, as well, because they encourage workers to route their paper documents into digital workflows, while desktop printers encourage workers to turn part of an electronic workflow into a slow paper-based process, while also adding consumables costs in paper and ink or toner.
Scanners Versus MFPs
Electronic Office Systems’ Ritschel mentioned that a buyer can deploy network scanning throughout an office using MFPs that are already in place. “What buyers should be taking a look at is their MFP onramp,” he said.
On the other hand, “MFPs are competent machines and scanning capabilities are improving; however, they’re designed to scan light volumes of documents throughout their daily work cycle. MFPs do not approach the threshold of high performance provided by today’s document scanners,” McMahan said. A July 2007 report from InfoTrends entitled, “Document Imaging Scanner Forecast for North America: 2006–2011” forecasted that document scanner placements in North America will increase at an annual rate of 14 percent through 2011, growing from fewer than 400,000 unit shipments in 2006 to more than 700,000 in 2011.
BLI’s Ellerman pointed out, “Dedicated scanners can take up less space and come as small as a travel size or desktop version.” Ellerman also mentioned that if an organization is considering the purchase of either a scanner or a new MFP for a particular location in their office, price is a key factor, since a small scanner with all the functions a user needs can be purchased for far less than an MFP.
Document scanners are designed for one purpose: converting paper documents into digital images. As a result, they can do so better, faster and more productively than an MFP,” said BÖWE BELL + HOWELL’s Horn, a sentiment shared by HP’s Haining. He said, “It often makes sense to have a specialized device such as a scanner to incorporate features such as dual-sided scanning, input error control [double feed detection] and real-time verification.”
Horn sees room for both kinds of devices in many offices. “MFPs and dedicated document scanners often coexist in an office environment. In fact, the two technologies can complement one another,” she said. Kodak’s McMahan agreed, saying, “Depending on daily paper volume and other factors, a solution may require dedicated high-speed, high-output production scanning, another may dictate scanning at employee desktops, a third may call for network scanning that everyone in the office can access and a fourth may need combining all three!”
Efficiently deploying both MFPs and dedicated scanners in an office allows scanning to be performed without interrupting the normal workflow of an MFP. Haining noted, “Having a dedicated device avoids contention when printing, copying and scanning must be done simultaneously.”