Visioneer PaperPort Strobe review

Despite Visioneer's dominance in the desktop sheet-fed scanner market, its latest offering is rather poor in comparison to others featured here. The PaperPort line has achieved success by being incredibly easy to use. Plugging straight into your PC's parallel port, PaperPorts are designed to sit snugly between your keyboard and monitor. With the help of the PaperPort software, you're then able to build up a cluttered digital desktop, in theory to make up for the lack of paper on your real desktop.

Whereas previously the PaperPort scanners were limited to scanning in greyscales, the PaperPort Strobe scans in colour, opening up 'a whole new world of scanning', in marketing speak. As with other PaperPort products, it's commendably simple to set up and operate, using an AC power adaptor that plugs into a parallel passthrough port. Two cables run from that: one to the parallel port on your PC, the other into the Strobe itself. A serial version is also available from Visioneer.

With the scanner installed, all you need to do is load the PaperPort 5 software and you're ready to go. Once everything's installed, an icon in your Taskbar informs you of the readiness of the Strobe: green for go; yellow for wait a moment; and red for hold on, I'm not ready to scan. With green showing you can feed anything you want into the Strobe, provided it's not too thick, of course. The scanner automatically detects your document and pulls it through, loading the PaperPort software at the same time.

Initially, you'll be surprised at the Strobe's eagerness to scan. It's the fastest sheet-fed scanner on test here, gobbling an A4 letter scanned at 100dpi in six seconds, and an A4 full colour document at 300dpi in one minute, 56 seconds - although on my Cyrix P166+ system it took another minute to get the scan to the PaperPort desktop.

The Strobe emits a fairly grating noise as it scans. In addition, when you look at the results, you might have wished it had used less haste and more speed. Colour scans had bad streaking and poor colour recognition. Some tweaking of the PaperPort software could even most of this out, but at a first pass it's not impressive.

In the area where Visioneer has most experience, the PaperPort shines - black and white scans are performed quickly, efficiently and cleanly. Where things go a little awry is in the OCR portion of the package. Visioneer has decided to bundle Xerox's TextBridge OCR as its OCR engine, but its performance is lacklustre on the whole.

The PaperPort desktop allows you to drag and drop scanned text onto your favourite word processor, and in theory this will automatically OCR the text and output it into a new document. In practice, if you're lucky you get a document of weird-looking characters and spelling mistakes. If you're unlucky, the OCR may refuse to work at all, especially if your scan is not in one-bit black and white. Instead of telling you to adjust the contrast, though, the OCR recognition starts, does nothing and tells you nothing. Not an intuitive way of working.

The PaperPort Strobe isn't a high-end scanner. It's designed to get paper-based information off your desktop and into your PC, and it does that efficiently enough. It's just a shame you might not be able to do much with it when it gets there.

Author: Stephen Reid