I’m shopping for printers for a friend of mine who is setting up a small one person office. We’ve been looking at all-in-one B&W laser printers, but one thing she needs to do occasionally is scan large-ish documents that are printed double-sided. It looks like only the really expensive laser all-in-ones have the duplex scanning feature where it can scan both sides of the document simultaneously. Although oddly, some of the fairly cheap inkjet all-in-ones do, but those don’t really meet her printing needs.
Now, it seems like there should be a pretty easy software solution to this. You should be able to run a multi-page double sided document through the scanner with the APF, flip the document over, run it through again and then have the scanning software collate the pages into the right order. Googling, however, I am getting very mixed messages as to how difficult this is to do or if it’s even possible. My friend will probably be wanting the files in .pdf form and may or may not buy Acrobat Pro once she gets going.
Anybody have any experience with this they can share?
I think the best option is a stand-alone document scanner (like the Fujitsu S1500, what I have). I did not like any of the all-in-ones when I was looking. You can put a 30 page document into it and have it scanned in less than two minutes (both sides). The software is pretty good and (when I bought it) it came with acrobat (not just the reader). Buying anything less than that (especially in an all-in-one device) would likely be a false economy.
I think the Op should clarify what “large-ish documents” means and also how many need to be occasionally scanned at a time. By “large-ish” is it volume or size.
Duplex printing is a very common feature, but what we need is duplex scanning, which is not. It does seem like the ones in the $500 range are where you start seeing that feature, but we’re trying to get something cheaper at this point. The ones we’ve looked at are in the $200-$300 range.
Although what do you mean by recognize page numbers? If the software allows you to feed the pages in non-sequentially and it’ll automatically put them in order, that might be helpful, although sometimes these documents won’t have page numbers.
I think you’re probably right, but again, those cost a little bit more than we want to spend right now. She could maybe justify dropping $350 on one of those if standalone laser printers were significantly cheaper, but they’re not. I think it is very possible that if she can get by with a cheap laser all-in-one for now, a dedicated document scanner could be added to the office once things get going.
Sorry, I mean by number of pages. Probably around 30-50 pages. The pages themselves should be normal sized.
Buy a cheapish laser B&W, even the cheapest ones are good nowadays. Just make sure the consumables are reasonably priced on that particular model.
And get a dedicated document scanner like this: Fujitsu Scansnap iX500. The price is a bit steep on this, but you get what you pay for. It can scan a 50 page document in a minute or so. Plus, there are many options on the software for automatic alignment of pages or blank page removal which ensures that your output PDF will be perfect, no need to touch it up after scanning.
I personally have the older Scansnap S1500 and it is bulletproof. It can handle any type and size of paper with no jams. Before that I had used the scanners from several all-in-one printers and they all left a lot to be desired. The main problem was the paper jams. They work ok when new but after using them for a few months they start jamming.
30-50 page scan jobs? She needs a dedicated scanner, no ifs ands or buts. Fujitsu pretty much owns this market, but Canon, Epson, and a couple others also have similar scanners that do duplex scans. The current Fujitsu model is called the ScanSnap iX500, and it comes with Acrobat for basic PDF editing. They do have a smaller and cheaper model, but it does not come with Acrobat, and only handles 10 pages at a time.
I understand that those document scanners are super-nifty, but $350+ and another $150 for a dedicated laser printer just isn’t in the budget right now.
She’d only be doing this maybe 2-3 times a month at the most, at least to start out. At this point the two alternatives are paying an extra $50 or so for a printer that has an APF scanner, or running to Kinkos. If it is just a matter of running the pages through the APF, flipping them over and running them through again, that’s obviously not as fast and easy as the document scanner, but would be perfectly fine for as infrequently as she needs to do it.
You can create two PDF files one containing the odd pages and another with the even numbered pages and then merge them with PDFsam.
This of course will work until the cheapo scanner starts to jam. I had an Epson that after a few months of use started jamming very badly, every third or fourth page. A simple scanjob that would take seconds with the ScanSnap, took an hour with the Epson.
How much do Kinko’s charge? Maybe this would be a better short term option.