Product Reviews

Many businesses aspire to a paperless office, but most have found it a daunting goal to realise. The price of HP's new scanner isn't a misprint: the Scanjet N7710 is squarely aimed at businesses looking for a fast and easy way to digitise large numbers of documents. The N7710 isn't very attractive, but it's compact and has an automatic document feeder (ADF), which can handle up to 50 A4 sheets. It can scan both sides of an A4 sheet at the same time, thanks to a pair of imaging units, and a double-feed detector does a reasonable job of separating and re-scanning the rare pages that are drawn in simultaneously.

There's no flatbed, though, so pages from books can't be scanned, and neither can film. A dedicated card feed slot means that idenity and business cards can be scanned, but trying to put business cards through the normal sheet feed just resulted in paper jams. Despite the price, there's only a USB interface, so you'll have to connect the N7710 to a local PC rather than making it available directly on your network. While images can be scanned, the resolution is limited to a relatively low 600dpi.

Given the price, we were expecting great performance, and the HP didn't disappoint here. We scanned 10-page colour and mono documents at 150dpi, 300dpi, and 600dpi. Predictably, we saw the fastest speeds in our 150dpi mono test, in which all 10 pages were scanned in just 22 seconds, averaging 27ppm. 300dpi scans took just a few seconds longer, while 600dpi colour produced images good enough for high-quality archival. We had to wait

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a bit longer, but scans were still performed at a very reasonable 8ppm for mono and 5ppm in colour.

There are just six buttons to launch driver presets, cancel jobs, open configuration windows and scan directly to a printer. You can select from up to 30 profiles, with 11 presets including mono and greyscale scans to PDF, colour scans to TIFF, and optical character recognition (OCR) to an RTF document. The initial presets were limited, but it was easy to create additional profiles using HP's Smart Document Scan software. Every detail can be configured, from resolution to file format and naming patterns. The only way to identify what each of the scanner's numbered profiles did was by printing them out and sticking this list to a plastic tab that pulls down from the scanner's body. Other options include page straightening and colour drop-out functions that allow you to specify a colour to be ignored in scanned documents. The Smart Document Scan software also lets you re-order pages after scanning and add additional pages to the same job.

Kofax's Virtual ReScan (VRS) software is incorporated into the driver. VRS can intelligently remove dark backgrounds from mono scans to make text more legible. Also included are IRIS's ReadIris PRO 11 OCR package and Nuance's ScanSoft PaperPort 11. PaperPort can use OCR to create an index file of the document's text. Unfortunately, this is time-consuming and the document itself is never made fully searchable. We found it annoying to use, exacerbated by disabled options that prompt a message inviting you to buy PaperPort Professional.

The Scanjet N7710 is a fast and efficient way to enter documents into a management system, but it isn't without its flaws. Installation was more difficult than it should have been, with several different programs to install and register in the correct order before everything worked properly. Its ability to transform a bulky document into a legible, neatly aligned PDF in a matter of seconds is convenient. However, while it can scan up to 1,500 double-sided pages per day, £580 including VAT is a hefty amount of money to spend on any scanner.