Business-class scanners
Digitising your documents can reap huge productivity rewards. Dave Mitchell explains what to look for in a professional-grade scanner, and puts four models to the test
The first step to digitising your workflow is to capture everything that’s on paper. Dave
Mitch ell explains what to look for in a businessclass scanner and puts four to the test.
“With many businesses looking to downsize offices as they move to a hybrid working model, it’s the perfect time to go digital”
Document flow has been one of many casualties of the pandemic. With employees abruptly shifting from a central location to their own homes, piles of paperwork will undoubtedly have been left in limbo back at the office. Meanwhile, new documents received or generated in the past year may not have been properly filed or shared – and security issues arise too when workers start handling sensitive documents at home.
Against this backdrop, the benefits of digitisation have never been clearer. Documents stored in a central digital repository are impossible to mislay and they’re accessible to everyone – an increasingly decisive benefit as working from home becomes a normal part of life.
There are valuable space savings to be made too. With many businesses already looking to downsize their offices as they move to a hybrid working model, it’s the perfect time to go digital: once your hard copies have been scanned, you can send the originals to secure archival storage, and then ditch those space-wasting filing cabinets.
It doesn’t have to be a lengthy or expensive project. There are plenty of fast and affordable desktop scanners on the market: this month, we test business-class models from Brother, Canon, Fujitsu and Kodak to help you make the right buying decision.
■ MFP or dedicated scanner?
Rather than investing in a dedicated scanner, you may be tempted to go for a multifunction printer (MFP), which combines scanning, printing and copying functions in one device. It sounds like a convenient bit of convergence, but these devices often come with compromises: even the pricier models tend to have slow scan speeds and limited paper capacities. You can end up wasting a lot of employee time as users wait around to keep the scanner fed with pages.
For anything more than light scanning duties, therefore, it’s normally smarter to buy a dedicated scanner. Even those in the £350-£450 price range offer fast scan speeds of 40-50 pages per minute and largecapacity automatic document feeders (ADFs) so they can work through large stacks of documents without supervision. They can handle high volumes of documents too, with the four models in this guide offering daily duty cycles ranging from 3,000 pages up to a massive 20,000 pages.
Most dedicated scanners can handle double-sided (duplex) scanning too, which you won’t always get from an MFP. This digitises both sides of a page automatically; if your scanner lacks this capability, you’ll need to manually flip over any double-sided documents that you want to scan.
■ Make sure you’re connected
Virtually all business desktop scanners can be driven from a desktop PC over a USB connection. This makes it easy to centralise scan operations in one location and control who is allowed to use the scanner.
Networked scanners are more expensive but more versatile. Since a scanner like this doesn’t have to be connected to a host PC, you can locate it more or less anywhere you like around the office. If you choose a model with Wi-Fi then the only
constraint on where you put it is the availability of a power socket. Many scanners offer both wired and wireless networking, but you’ll normally have to choose one or the other – very few let you use both interfaces together.
Rather than using a dedicated host PC, users can drive a networked scanner from their own desks, and you can apply basic access controls by only installing the drivers and software for those who need to scan. Most network scanners also support walk-up-and-scan operations, where you press a button on the scanner to digitise a document and send the output to a predefined location, such as a server or a specific PC.
Some vendors offer free mobile apps too, allowing users to scan documents directly into a smartphone or tablet. If you want your mobile workforce to enjoy tap-and-scan operations, choose a model with an NFC chip; users can hold a phone against this to register it as a scan destination.
■ Document decisions
All scanners come with control software that lets you specify what resolution you want to scan at, whether you want to produce colour or greyscale output, and what file format your digitised document should be saved in. We generally recommend scanning paperwork at 200dpi greyscale, as this allows for clear and legible text without wasting storage space.
PDF is always a good choice of file format, since it works with a huge range of applications and supports searchable text, enabling you to quickly locate documents containing specific details such as customer names. To create searchable PDFs you’ll need scanning software with optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities, but this isn’t something you normally need to worry about as suitable tools are almost invariably bundled with business scanners.
■ Final destination
As well as picking the format of your scans, the scanner software will prompt you to choose where your digital files should be saved to. It’s important to standardise on these locations – it will be impossible to manage your digital documents if they’re scattered to the four winds. Typical destinations include local folders and networked shares; many suites can also upload scans directly to FTP or SharePoint servers.
One feature that’s worth looking closely at is cloud support. Services such as Dropbox or Google Drive can act as a handy central repository for document sharing, especially for remote workers. Support varies substantially across vendors, though. The best scanner software lets you log into cloud accounts and save scanned documents directly into specific folders; other tools just save your scans into the local sync folder and leave it to the cloud client software to do the rest – a rather less reliable approach.
For this month’s buyer’s guide we’ve rounded up four affordable desktop scanning solutions, each offering an impressive range of professional document handling features ideally suited to SMBs. Read on to see how to slim down your filing cabinets and reclaim your office.
“PDF is always a good choice of file format, since it works with a huge range of applications and supports searchable text”