Plustek SmartOffice PS456U
It lacks network support, but this speedy scanner is a department-class piece of kit at a workgroup price
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE from morecomputers.com
£414 exc VAT
At first glance, Plustek’s little SmartOffice PS456U looks unremarkable. But underneath its glossy, white plastic exterior lurks an astonishingly fast 80ppm scan engine. Thanks to its duplex capability, that equates to a filecabinet-busting 160ipm. The big 100-sheet ADF and 8,000-page daily duty cycle confirm this is a scanner that’s up for heavy-duty digitising.
The key thing that’s missing is network support. Still, the PS456U is a cinch to install on a dedicated host PC; we connected its USB 2 port to our Windows 10 workstation and had all the software apps loaded in less than ten minutes.
It’s an impressive software bundle. Along with TWAIN, ISIS and WIA drivers, you get the slick DocAction scan-configuration tool, ABBYY FineReader 9 Sprint for OCR duties and NewSoft’s Presto! PageManager 9 SE document-management utility.
The DocAction tool is extremely versatile, allowing you to assign up to nine different jobs to the scanner’s Function button. Its sidebar lists all nine available job types, which include scans to local or network folders, searchable PDFs, FTP servers, a local MAPI-compliant email client, and direct to a printer. Selecting one opens all its configuration options in the main pane, so you can easily select colour, mono or greyscale, opt for simplex or duplex scans, and choose an output file format for each one.
From the same screen, you can pick a resolution, adjust brightness or contrast, and activate features such as punch-hole and blank-page removal, auto-crop, deskew and individual rotation settings for each side of a page. We confirmed the effects of our selections as we went along by popping a page in the scanner, selecting the preview button and checking the resulting image.
DocAction lacks support for direct cloud connections, so we could only send scans to our local Dropbox, Evernote and Google Drive sync folders. Plustek’s ScanToCloud app is free, but we couldn’t get it to work: although we could use it to send documents directly to our remote FTP server, it refused to log in to any of our cloud provider accounts.
In our tests, we actually beat the scanner’s cited 80ppm top speed: the PS456U ripped through our sheaf of 50 bank statements in 37 seconds at both 200dpi and 300dpi resolutions for a tidy average of 81ppm. Note that this was all in mono – colour scans are slower, but still impressive. In our tests, the PS456U averaged a betterthan-claimed 46ppm in colour at 200dpi and 30ppm at 300dpi.
Even at 600dpi, the PS456U is no slouch, with mono and colour scans averaging 24ppm and 5ppm respectively. Output quality at 200dpi is perfectly adequate for document archiving, and FineReader did an excellent job of correctly converting