Which Scanner for fast Txt scans (UK)

[j_maddison]

Just wondering if anyone can help with a recommendation for a scanner. I want to scan in my old lecture notes I have from university. They've been gathering dust under my bed and generally taking up space for years. It would be handy if I could transfer these notes to my Mac.

I'm looking for a scanner that comes in at under £200 (willing to go slightly higher if needed, although lower would be preferred). I'm unlikely to ever scan in any photos, umm ever! So my need is for this scanner to be always used to scan in documents that are txt based.

Thanks for reading and hope someone can help

Jason

P.s I have a 12 Rev A Al book, so no usb2. But I should be upgrading in the near future. Not sure if this is relevant

 

[redeye be]

Don't have a product recomendation ready but looks like u will deffinetly need a document feeder. I have a flatbed scanner without feeder and wouldn't even dare to dream about scanning 100+ pages on the same day

As for the usb, i don't think u should be concerned. A 2.0 scanner will work with your 1.0 PB ( - mine does )

You will however need good OCR software (could be in the package, could be the package sucks)

Cheers and good luck searching.

 

[j_maddison]

Thanks mate, i'll keep the feeder in mind. Much apprecaited.

Jason

 

[madmaxmedia]

I was thinking about this the other day- scanning work documents to archive on my computer. Plain text can be scanned in B&W, such that PDF's of your documents are very manageable in size- under 100 kb. For most business documents, I think this would be fine (or maybe 4-bit grayscale.)

It would be great if you had an OCR that automatically generated a PDF file with both the original scanned 'image', and the OCR results. This way you'd have both in a single file, and could toss the original knowing you could correct for OCR mistakes later. Of course, these documents would also be Spotlightable.

Xerox has a scanner which seems to be more focused on text documents rather than images. It has a document feeder, seems fast, and I think it's within your budget (I'm an ignorant American so I'm no sure )

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10355605&loc=101&hdwt=30901&sp=1
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,114941,00.asp
http://reecewilton.tripod.com/blog/2004_04_01_reecew_archive.html

 

[j_maddison]

Hey thanks for the information

I've just checked out the scanner you suggested, and odly enough (or maybe not that odd) its twice the price in the uk as it is in the USA. The cheapest I could find it for was £299 (roughtly$530) from a communications company I used to work for. I should be able to get a discount of 20% because I still know guys who work there.

The only thing that concerns me is that it says its only windows compatible. I've had a look at the system requirments on several websites, and on every one it says windows only.

Jason