reapersaurus said:
Thanks, all. This is some of what I was hoping for.
What HP Scanjet do you use? They have many models, don;t they?
Rackir -
The Fujitsu (as I've been told) is a piece of crap from the 20th century. AFAIK, the ScanPartner 15C is over 5 years old.
It's very likely that the ADF needs repair - I don't know, and I don't use it. I'll try again to scan some next week.
I find it hard to believe that there hasn't been something in the past 5 years that isn't significantly better than this old technology
But from what I'm gathering, the industry has kind of gone past simple hi-speed document imaging, and morphed to more photographic scanning (with huge resolution, etc). But isn't Imaging a BIG business? What do those companies use for the hardware (my toughest decision).
The software, I'm sure many would do the trick - the only way our Repair Orders will scan is if the operator makes a label and sticks it on the order, because it's mechanic's hand-written numbers (unable to OCR, of course).
Currently, the scanner saves multiple repair order pages in one multi-page .tiff file (which is shockingly small in size, around 2 MB).
They have always just used Kodak Imaging Professional and typed the RO #'s in the Comments field of the .tiff file. These comments are invisible to XP clients, yet can be Searched (Find File) by 98 clients.
I know about the XP Index Service blindness to .tiff files and have modified the service, but the Comments filed is still invisible to XP.
Anyone have recommendations for good hi-speed ADF scanners (around $1000 or less)?
I work for a document imaging company in the UK. If we sell a scanner with our software it will be a Fujitsu. The Fujitsu 15C is an old scanner, but is still being sold by Fujitsu (
http://www.fcpa.com/products/scanners/scanpartner-15c/), next one up is the 620c which is 20ppm (200dpi B&W). In our scanning bureau we use more expensive models fi4860C (A3/A4, 125 images per minutes in duplex mode, colour capable, no flatbed), 4570C (A3/A4, 125 images per minutes in duplex mode, colour capable) connected through KOFAX. I am unsure of pricing as I work on the technical side of the company.
When choosing a scanner you need to think of a few things
- Maximum paper size you want to scan
- Are there any documents that won't go through the ADF
- Colour or Black and White
- Resolution
- Speed
- Supported scanner interfaces (TWAIN,ISIS,KOFAX)
- Volumes
Most scanner specs will quote a scan speed based on A4 landscape @ 200 dpi, so take rated speeds with a pinch of salt. Some scanners will also have a Daily Duty Lifecycle; the scanner may be rated for 50 ppm but have a DDL of only 500 pages. To reach anything near rated speed you will need to make sure you speed time preping, it the most boring part of the job, good preping can save you time in the long run.
Most of the scanners in the Fujitsu range offer colour as standard.
IME you will need a flatbed option, mechanics/delivery drivers don not tend to keep paperwork nicely filed before scanning. There will be some documents that do not go through the ADF.
As for scanning interfaces, most high end scanning systems will use KOFAX, it looks just like SCSI, but the card has extra image processing chips and can perform tricks such as deskew, despekle, barcode recognition etc on the fly with out any drop in speed. KOFAX writes their own drivers for the scanners (which is download to the card during startup) to squeeze every bit of performance they can from the scanner. They also do a product called Virtual Rescan (VRS), runs the scanner slower (it forces all scanns to greyscale) if the scan falls outside defined parameters then a dialog pops up allowing you to adjust the image on screen without feeding the document through again.
Next interface down is ISIS, most medium end solutions support this. It is a scanning standard maintained by Pixel Translations, like KOFAX they write and certify their own scanner drivers. Fujitsu have for download a program scalled ScandAll which uses ISIS drivers.
Finally there is TWAIN (Technology Without An Interesting Name). This is a published 'standard'. No one polices the standard and the quality of TWAIN driver varies widely between scanner makes.
Pricewise I know that KOFAX is expensive (as in most of your budget expensive).
It sounds like you are scanning Group4 compresed tiffs, these give a good compression ratio and are the same format that Fax machines used to transmit data (along with the older Group3 standard).
OCR'ing of hadwriting is a non-starter (too much time), the only thing of interest of the page is the sticker. If they are used to putting a sticker on you could put a barcoded sticker on.
As to your current problem I can only take a guess. Maybe the Imaging professional writes the information in a private tag in the TIFF (Tagged Image File Format). When XP was being produced KODAK and Microsoft had a falling out, as a result MS dropped the imaging product from XP and wrote their own picture and fax viewer. This may ignore the tags in the file that store the summary info. Does this info appear on a windows 2000 machine (this still used the KODAK software)?
Hope this is useful, so I can't help on pricing info. If you get desperate email me one or two samples (if you are allowed) tiffs and i'll see if I can come up with any ideas.
