I retired after nearly 37 years with the Federal Government this
month. Now I can take on those projects I never had time for while I
was working. One of those projects high on my list was becoming as "paperless" as
possible at home.
To that end, I did some research and
one of the first things the paperless "gurus" recommend is getting a
good sheet-fed, duplex scanner - these are much faster than trying to scan
everything with a flatbed one page at a time.
Further research indicated
that the big three "home office" (i.e. pricey, but not ridiculously so)
sheet-fed scanners are; the Fujitsu Scansnap ix500, Epson Workforce
DS-560, and NeatDesk or NeatCloud Desktop models.
I researched various tech and retail sites to find comprehensive reviews of the three finalists. I won't bore you with too many details, the following is an abbreviated rationale for my
"winning" selection.
My "everyday" computer is a Mac, my wife's is a
PC. We both have iPhones and iPads. Ideally, we want to be able to
initiate scans from any of those devices without the hassle of plugging
and unplugging USB cables and physically moving the scanner close to the computer doing the scanning. Scanning from the iOS devices means the
scanner has to support WiFi.
Although the Neat Scanners
get high marks for their software and support all our devices, the
hardware has received consistently dismal reviews on various sites - so Neat's out.
The Fujitsu is pretty much the Cadillac of sheet-fed scanners and their software gets high marks, but in
reading about device support, it can only be "tied" (even via WiFi) to
one device at a time. When we want to scan, we don't want to have to
worry that our spouse has their computer connected to the scanner, have
to ask them to disconnect, then add it to our machine, etc. - as much as
it pained me, Fujitsu was also out.
The winner: the Epson Workforce DS-560.
My next installment will share the process and some tips on the initial connection of the DS-560 to a Mac running OS X 10.9.5 (Mavericks) via Wifi. Something that should be fairly straightforward in 2015 - but wasn't.
