Good ADF (sheet-fed) scanner?

[Nazo]

At the same time my grandmother needs a new printer, my mother needs a new scanner -- but we're not talking about a normal flatbed scanner. She has been using a sheet-fed scanner that can let her put in a bunch of pages at once and it automatically pulls through one page at a time, scanning both sides of the pages, then when it finishes it automatically saves the documents in a PDF file. (Specifically she had the Fujitsu S510.) Her scanner died and is now discontinued, so she's looking at having to at the very least buy a newer replacement by the same people on the same product line. However, I thought that before she does I should check to make sure there isn't anything better. The problem is, I really don't even know where to start looking for scanners of this type, much less really how to tell anything about their qualities before actually buying and finding out the hard way.

I do know one thing though. I'm very dissatisfied with Fujitsu in general. They made them use parts that have to be replaced far too quickly which were nearly impossible to actually buy (and extremely expensive when you do buy them) and then for some reason pretty much abandoned these scanners even before they were actually discontinued. When I upgraded her computer and installed the 64-bit edition of Windows 7, I found out the hard way that they would not let anyone have drivers -- as in they actually refused anyone who asked even though they did have some that were known to be working 100% saying that 64-bit 7 wasn't supported on those and they'd have to just buy a newer model (and of course they were all to glad to suggest a few of their own products.) After a lot of hard searching, I did find a place where someone had shared the drivers that did work and installed them. They worked exactly like the older 32-bit XP drivers for her without a problem in the world. IMO this is bad business practice and I just can't trust any company like this who would screw over their own customers with such expensive products (especially if you add in the cost of components to keep the thing going for so long.)

I'm also not very happy with the whole PDF thing and can't help but to wonder if such a scanner couldn't actually just OCR things and save as more plain documents (of course, it would have to be smart enough to actually handle images I guess.) The PDFs end up being quite huge which just seems like absolute waste to me since she is storing probably hundreds of books this way and is surely eventually going to run out of storage space on her backup drive. She does have books with pictures however, so it does have to handle images and I'm not sure if any are smart enough to automate this process for her. (I really don't think she could do it manually, plus the purpose is to run it automatically so she can basically leave the room and come back to it with a book -- or at least a good part of a book -- finished scanning needing nothing more than a filename to save to.) PDF is better than anything that requires her to actually interact with it a lot (especially if it's any sort of complicated interaction. She won't write down instructions, so if it's not easy to remember it's a problem.)

Budget is definitely an issue with her. I forget what sort of pricerange she is aiming for, but I think it's more around $300 or less ideally. Anyone know of any sheetfed scanners that can do the stuff she needs within this sort of range? Or is it pretty much just going to have to be the newer equivalent ScanSnap model?

 

[Term-X]

I bought a Canon MX-320. It's a colour inkjet MF/All-in-one printer. It has both flatbed and ADF-style scanning capabilities which I've used quite a few times now to scan in multi-page documents. Also has a built in fax but I haven't used that just yet.

The only cons I can really think of (and I don't think I can vouch for reliability just yet since I've only had it for half a year) is that it's a two cartridge system (black/colours). So you can't buy individual colours if you run out. Second, it's pretty noisey so I wouldn't recommend it for night time use if you are worried about waking others.


I bought it for $34 shipped.

 

[Nazo]

Noise isn't an issue for her. However, something like that surely isn't going to cut it. She literally is actually scanning books. As in hundreds of pages many days and probably even around a thousand or more on some days. (Yeah, that means tearing the pages out. Not something I'd be ok with personally, but apparently she is, lol.) I seriously doubt a low end all-in-one printer is going to be able to handle that kind of load. As expensive as the Fujitsu scanner ended up being with the replacement parts every fifteen thousand pages or so (I forget how many thousands it was before you were supposed to replace the parts,) having to actually replace the entire device probably so much more often that it not only would be a pain, but probably ultimately would be more costly.

Also, don't forget that it must automate going into a format that can fully handle her books -- images and all. (I think she even has some textbooks on subjects like iridology where images are required as part of the content -- we're not talking about scanning something where illustrations can be just left out and no harm done.) There's no way she can do thus stuff manually unless it's kept VERY simple. The ScanSnap probably goes overboard in this respect since all she has to do is press the scan button on the scanner and handles everything up until it has to ask for a filename and save location for the output.