Saturday 28 September 2013

Xerox DocuMate 4440

Pros Good OCR performance. Good feature set. Has 9 programmable one-touch scan profiles.

Cons No business card software. Bottom Line The Xerox DocuMate 4440 is a duplex color document scanner that offers good speed and OCR quality.

By Tony Hoffman

The Xerox DocuMate 4440 is a color duplex document scanner with a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF). It provides one-touch scanning from 9 preset and customizable scan profiles, either from your computer or the scanner itself. It showed good speed and OCR quality in our testing.

The 4400 has a 12-by-7-inch footprint (WD), and weighs 8 pounds. It has a straight-through paper path, allowing it to scan business cards as well as ID cards and other plastic cards up to 1.3 mm thick, although it doesn't include a business card program. It can also scan paper at up to 8.5 by 38 inches. It offers ultrasonic double-feed detection sensor to catch paper misfeeds. Compare Selected

Like most document scanners, the 4440 can scan at up to 600 dpi; it can scan in black and white, grayscale, or color. You can select (or customize) any of nine preset Visioneer OneTouch scan profiles. To the right of the ADF is the single-character blue LED that's used to display the number of the current scan profile, which you can switch between with up and down arrows. To launch a scan from the scanner, you press either the Simplex or Duplex button.

The default OneTouch scanning profiles and destinations include Scan (image PDF); PDF (searchable PDF); Print (BMP); E-mail (PDF); Fax (BMP); OCR (RTF); Archive (searchable PDF, 300 dpi); Business Card (BMP); and Paint (BMP). It can scan to PDF, searchable PDF, JPEG, TIFF, and BMP formats; it can also scan to RTF and other document formats if you install either the included PaperPort or OmniPage Pro.

Scanning
You can initiate scans directly from the scanner, by choosing a profile and hitting either the Simplex or Duplex button, or from the OneTouch interface on your computer. (A OneTouch icon appears at the bottom of the screen at startup; clicking on it shows you the numbered scan profiles) In addition, you can scan from Nuance PaperPort or OmniPage Plus, or from nearly any program that has a scan command thanks to the included Twain and WIA drivers.

The 4440 can also be daisy-chained to the Xerox DocuMate 4700 flatbed through a direct USB connection to that scanner, enabling you to easily scan from within applications from the scanner of your choice. They worked well together, and the 4440 was just as fast when connected to the 4700 as it was when hooked directly to the computer.

Software
Buindled software includes Visioneer OneTouch, Nuance PaperPort for document management, Nuance OmniPage Pro for OCR, and Kofax VRS (virtual re-scan) Basic for scan enhancement. A version of the 4440 with an upgrade to Kofax VRS Professional, which adds a wealth of additional scan management and improvement features, is also available through Xerox for $1,195 (direct).

Speed
The DocuMate 4440 has a rated speed of 40 pages per minute (ppm) for simplex scanning and 40 ppm / 80 images per minute (ipm) for duplex scanning, where each side of a page counts as one image. In speed testing using the OneTouch default settings (image PDF, black and white, 200 dpi), the 4440 nearly matched its rated speed for simplex scanning, testing at 36 ppm, and tailing off a little (29 ppm/58 ipm) in duplex, though the score is still well within a respectable range. The Editors' Choice Xerox DocuMate 5445, rated at 45 ppm/90 ipm, tested at 37.5 ppm for simplex and 37.5 ppm/75 ipm for duplex scanning. The Kodak i2400, rated at 30 ppm simplex and 60 ipm duplex, tested at 25.4 ppm in simplex and 49.1 ipm in duplex.

In scanning our 25-page, 50-image test document to searchable PDF (sPDF), the 4440 averaged 1 minute 43 seconds to scan, recognize and save the file, a respectable time for a document scanner—many scanners in its price range take upwards of 2 minutes, and some over 3 minutes, to do this—though not in the top tier. We timed the Kodak i2400 at 1:34 and the Xerox 5445 at 1 minute 18 seconds in scanning the same document to searchable PDF. The Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula DR-C125 not only matched its 25 ppm/50 ipm speeds in scanning to image PDF, it didn't lose a second in scanning and saving our test document to searchable PDF, finishing in a minute flat.

OCR
The 4440 did well in our OCR testing, reading both our Times New Roman and Arial test fonts at sizes as small as 8 points without error. It also did reasonably well with some of our less common fonts.

The Xerox DocuMate 4440 is easy to recommend for a desktop document scanner at its price. It offers duplex scanning and a 50-sheet ADF. You can choose any of 9 programmable scan profiles, using arrow buttons for one-touch scanning. It can scan ID and business cards, though it lacks a business-card program. Its OCR performance is good. It nearly matches its rated speed, especially for simplex scanning, in scanning to image PDF. It isn't quite as fast in scanning to searchable PDF as several scanners at similar or lower price, such as the Kodak i2400 and the Editors' Choice Canon DR-C125, but it should be fast enough for most businesses.


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