Document Management Solutions from Intelligent Filing
The Document Management Consultants
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Document Scanners
When choosing a scanner, a number of factors need to be considered. These include, paper size (typically A3 or A4), resolution required, scanning speed, paper handling and the required image format (ie colour, grayscale or bi-tonal).
The thickness, sizes, edges and surface finish of your documents affect paper handling, and there are a variety of mechanisms available to suit different document combinations. These range from Automatic Document Feeders with capacities of up to 1,000 pages and advanced double feed detection to flatbed units for fragile documents or books.
Any scanner will give a good crisp image from a clean black and white original but real documents, such as forms, invoices and correspondence, which feature coloured backgrounds, text ranging from dot matrix printers to handprint in a variety of colours and effects, like highlighter pens, require more sophisticated technology.
A key reason to scan at a lower resolution is the throughput of the scanner, as scanning at higher resolutions will slow the speed of the scanner. Most manufacturers will quote throughput speeds using an A4 document at 200dpi (dots per inch) in portrait mode. The price of storage has been reducing year on year so the cost of storing the larger files produced by colour scanning is becoming much less of an issue. t moving these images around the network to the user is also much less of an issue, the same is true of retrieving via the internet although both are dependent on the volume of retrievals at peak times.
You should Also consider the durability of the scanner. Each product has a duty cycle that indicates the maximum daily volume that it is designed to process. This is calculated from the total number of scans that the manufacturer designed the scanner to achieve during the equipment life and then divided into a volume per day. Which means that scanners will often perform well above the daily throughput but constantly doing so will severely shorten the equipment life.