Fast and Furious Scanning to Solve Your Legacy Document Dilemma

One of the facts of life in any governmental office is that you can never throw a single record away. The rules say that if this piece of paper can be construed an official document, then by golly it’s gotta stay in the files. Since the digital era began, however, the public sector finds itself in a quandary: data are being captured in digital form today, but there remains a huge legacy of paper documents stashed in rank after rank of file cabinets down in the basement. Early on most agencies began efforts to capture these data by transcription, but those efforts had their own problems, especially in the area of accuracy. As the price of digital storage continues to decrease, however, the feasibility of capturing and storing images of the documents has increased. Recently, our office took the plunge and began transferring almost 100 years of records – thousands of files, each with anywhere from one to one hundred pages – from paper to scanned images.

To begin such a process, however, we needed a high-speed scanner; a TWAIN-compliant scanner with a Windows XP interface, one that could be placed on a desktop yet could handle hundreds of pages at a time. We needed versatility as well: the ability to scan both one-sided and duplex documents, capture both text and images, scan documents on anything from onionskin paper to card stock, and scan in either color or black and white. Our choice? Well, not that I had anything to do with it (this is a government office, after all) but they picked the one I wanted: the Canon DR-9080C. Here’s why I wanted it…


Scanning Versatility

The Canon DR-9080C color production scanner takes up about as much space on your desk as an ordinary laser printer. The unloaded footprint is 18 by 21 inches, with a height of about 13 inches (46.5 cm by 52.5 cm by 33 cm high). For each job the operator can select either simplex or duplex mode; as well as choose from 24-bit color, 8-bit grayscale, or black and white modes.

The input tray at the top of the unit takes paper up to twelve inches (30.5 cm) long in landscape format (feeding the long edge first) so it handles letter and A4 paper more or less in “native” mode. There’s a minimum width in this orientation of 2.2 inches (56 mm); the minimum length the scanner handles is 2.8 inches (71 mm). If your page is longer than twelve inches, simply place it in portrait orientation: the scanner handles lengths up to seventeen inches (43.2 cm) in normal mode or 39.4 inches (100 cm) in long-document mode. The document feeder input tray is deep enough to hold 500 sheets of bond paper.

The automatic feeder is designed specifically to handle mixtures of sizes and weights in the input tray. As long as the dimensions of the paper are within its limits, the feeder will auto-adjust to both paper size and paper thickness. For your thickest paper (more than 0.05 inch or 0.15mm) the operator can shift to manual feed. If any staples are detected while the feeder is running, the process halts immediately to avoid missing sheets. The double-feed detection system – it helps prevent two pages from going through the feeder simultaneously – has been a boon with some of the older files, where pages tend to stick together because of moisture and disuse. The students running it may wish that it simply “un-stuck” the sheets, but all it can do is stop the feeder and signal the operator. It also catches “partial” double-feeds, where two pages overlap in the feed system. Paper jams are pretty rare, but clearing is easy because the top of the scanner lifts off and you can temporarily lock it in place to remove and/or re-orient sheets.

Since we have a lot of old documents that are carbons, not to mention a few output from old thermal copiers, many are somewhat faded. One big selling point for this scanner was its text-enhancement mode, which helps increase the contrast to make text stand out more in the scanned image. Another is Canon’s “Multistream™” mode, which lets you generate combinations of two different output files instead of being locked into a single format. For instance, you can output an image in both color and black and white if you have a need to do so.

Other useful built-ins are hardware de-skewing – which straightens the image so as not to waste space – blank page detection, jpeg compression, and automatic recognition of text orientation. This last orients pages correctly during output, avoiding or greatly reducing the need for page rotation in the software stage.


Output Versatility

Everything that the DR-9080C captures everything coming through it at a resolution of 600 dpi, but the operator controls an output resolution of from 100 dpi (about the same as a cheap fax machine) to the native 600 dpi. We keep everything at 200 dpi except for an occasional color image or something that has tiny print. All images are routed out through Canon’s CapturePerfect software, which is bundled with the scanner. This software gives us all the tools we need for formatting and archiving our documents. On the majority of our jobs we convert the images to Adobe .pdf format (we are a government entity, after all) for storage. CapturePerfect performs OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the image and allows creation of multiple-page documents from related images.

Other useful capabilities of the software are software deskew and blank page detection. It can remove borders from your scanned images, rotate them, and flip pages. You can also omit a given color of ink (defined using RGB) from the scans using color dropout mode. Those color images are saved, by the way, as .jpg files.

Some software/driver features that are available but we don’t use them are scan to mail, scan to print, multi-image TIFF capability, and count only.


Scanning Speed

The DR-9080C’s nominal maximum speed for letter-size paper is 90 pages per minute in B/W and grayscale or 55 pages per minute in color. This is for simplex images fed landscape format with the auto-feeder at minimum output resolution (200 dppi for b/w or grayscale, 100 dpi for color), and such speed pretty much requires an unmixed stack of “standard” bond paper all the same size. Start mixing up page sizes and paper thicknesses, and things naturally slow down – not that we have much complaint with scanning only 80 ppm in B/W mode. In duplex mode, both sides are scanned simultaneously, so maximum speed doesn’t change – you still get 90 pages per minute, but getting both sides means 180 images per minute. We scan almost all our documents an output resolution of 200 dpi, so we’re near maximum throughput most of the time


Tech Info

Connectivity We’re running the scanner off a dedicated Dell Precision Workstation. The scanner provides both a USB 2.0 interface and two SCSI 3 connections; we use the USB because it’s not on a network.

Drivers Everything’s plug-and-play on XP professional; there are also drivers for Windows 98/Me/2000/NT. Both ISIS and TWAIN drivers are included.

Available Extras: An imprinter (got one), an endorser, a hardcode counter, and a barcode module. The feeder rollers wear out and need to be replaced, so an exchange roller kit is also available.


Closing Notes

We’re not a document-storage and retrieval shop, so we don’t need a top-of-the line model: the DR-9080C is meant for low- to medium-volume imaging uses. We opted for the color capability, or else we could have saved a few hundreds of dollars by buying the DR-6080, which has all the same features but lacks color scanning.

This is not a scanner for your house (not at about $5-6K, it isn’t) and it’s also not a scanner for high-end graphics, since the input resolution is a “mere” 600 dpi. For an office like ours that must archive a lot of paper, however, it’s proven versatile and well-nigh indestructible. It doesn’t take up much room, it’s not much louder than a laser printer, and it hasn’t given us an ounce of trouble in the four months it’s been in house (knock wood). Highly recommended.