Epson GT-30000

Many flatbed scanners can be enhanced with the addition of ADFs (automatic document feeders), but Epson's GT-30000 gives no quarter. Instead of being a slow and low-capacity add-on unit, this ADF is an integral part of the machine, turning it into a powerful office document digitiser.

At its core, this is a 600 x 2,400ppi scanner with a 36-bit colour depth and a scanning bed just a few millimetres short of full A3. This means it's good for quality colour image scanning, and the large scanning area helps keep the device versatile across a wide range of document types. However, Epson has packaged the product specifically as a document digitiser for speeding up the chore of scanning large quantities of loose pages on a regular basis. This would particularly suit those building document image archives or needing to turn printed material back into editable files through OCR (optical character recognition).

The machine is delivered in a huge box and you'll need some help lifting the components out, let alone putting them together. The constructed device is large, even for an A3 scanner, and the ADF is surprisingly heavy. Due to this, it needs to be attached to the main body of the scanner by large bolts and screws, and the hinge doesn't allow it to be physically raised to accommodate thick originals on the plate. You get a standard flatbed lid in the box, but this can only be fitted with the ADF removed, which would defeat the purpose of choosing the GT-30000, as the fast ADF is the main differentiator from a typical flatbed scanner.

In use, the system works much like an office photocopier or digital copier. You drop a sheet or stack of papers in the feeder and these are passed individually to the scanning bed, being ejected on top of the feeder afterwards. Documents are placed face up, and automatic trim recognition means that you don't have to mark up a scan area for each page. Nor do you have to tell the software whether you're going to feed the sheets in portrait or landscape, although this will affect the orientation of the scans themselves. It may take some getting used to, but in order to guarantee right way up scans of A4 pages you need to feed them by the short edge rather than the long edge as you might with a photocopier.

The scan action can be triggered from the PC or by using the one-touch button on the GT-30000 itself. Doing the latter scans the entire job using predetermined settings. Assuming you bought the machine to handle vast quantities of repetitive material, this is ideal. If the nature of your scanning work changes frequently through the day, however, this simple one-button approach isn't flexible enough.

In operation, the ADF is quite noisy even though the scanning action is very quiet. The ADF is versatile and deals with a good range of paper sizes and weights without jamming. Particularly handy is the duplex handling, letting you stack up a heap of double-sided sheets in the feeder and leave the machine to scan each side in turn without user interference. Duplexing is also a lot faster than you might expect from a scanner, with each page being turned in an instant. Our only problem is that the default approach of feeding A4 sheets by the short edge means that duplexing effectively turns each sheet upside down, resulting in a string of image files that are alternately right way up and inverted. A better approach would be to scan everything by the long edge and use the software to rotate them all in a single pass.