Document Scanning

[oguevarra]

My office is looking at putting all our documents electronically (PDF, etc.). Anyone know of a company that does that?

[DarkFury]

One method is to use a digital sender. Our office uses one by HP... you basically use it like a fax machine, paper goes in and it e-mails you a .PDF copy of the document.

[Nija]

This is what I do for a living. I work for a company that images legal documents for the discovery phase (and on) of the legal process.

We make PDF's for counsels that don't have software (concordance, summation or custom). You can OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the documents so you can search within the PDF's easier.

Most of the larger firms prefer tiffs (group IV). Then we capture (usually folder) information and stick it into a database or a CSV. You can assign a prefix (Let's say all the documents are tax docs from 2004, prefix = TAX2004 or 2004IRS).

Now, if it's small scale, and something you want to keep in house ( and you are going to constantly be doing it ) I would recommend getting a decent (color?) scanner and either PIXView or Irfanview for software and you can be good to go.

[brainsmile]

how much work is it going to entail? Why not just get an all in one printer and scan it yourself?

[johnnymk]

I have years and years of various car magazines. Eventually I would like to scan various articles and many pictures from them.

What would be the fastest way to scan them? How many minutes per page color and how many pages per minute(text B&W) with a decent scanner? Any resolution is acceptable.

[brainsmile]

scanning takes about 40 seconds per page.

[GilbertsGrape]

we use our copiers at work for scanning. FAST probably 50 - 65 pages a min. Xerox docucolor 250

[Nija]

Color scanning at 600x600 takes MAYBE 5-7 seconds a page (on a good scanner :)) at 300dpi it shouldn't take longer than 2-3 seconds (slightly slower than B&W), again on a good scanner.

B&W should take no longer than 1-2 seconds a page at 300dpi. 300dpi is perfectly readable and there is no need to go any higher, same goes for color.

[ray]

I would take it to a FedEx Kinko's and see if they will do it for you. I'm pretty sure your time is worth a hell of a lot more than doing this all yourself.