Xerox sacrificed the most important duplex scanning (two-sided) feature on their sheet-fed scanners in order to break the $400 price barrier. Announced on June 23, 2008 and priced at $399, the Xerox DocuMate 150 is their cheapest sheet-fed document scanner. Announced on June 23, 2008, the DocuMate 150 is priced at $399. You can find it for around $350 by searching on price comparison sites like pricegrabber.com. If you buy this scanner, you will have to scan each page twice to be able to digitize both sides of the page. Considering this being a significant limitation, I am not sure how many units of this model that Xerox will sell.

Why do you need a duplex scanner?

Majority of the document scanners, even the least expensive ones, are deployed as part of paperless automation efforts. These solutions can vary from just document digitization solutions that help you get organized to a comprehensive enterprise content management solutions that help you run your entire business. In either case, you want single implementation that can handle both single-sided (simplex) and double-sided (duplex) pages in documents. In order for this automated solution to be truly effective, you need a duplex scanner. A simplex scanner just want do the job.

OfficeDrop’s experience with scanning customer documents

In the last four months of running the OfficeDrop beta, we have scanned hundreds and thousands of documents for households, professionals, home offices and small businesses. We found that only about 30% of the documents we received are printed on one side of the page. Specifically, there were only two categories of documents that have information printed only on one-side: store receipts and invoices. For us to truly offer a solution that scans all types of documents and yet be cost-effective to our customers, we needed to implement only one scanning solution and leverage scale efficiencies. This scanning solution scans both sides of the document, even if it meant scanning both sides of a one-sided page.

If you are in the market looking for a low-end document scanner, spend a little more and buy a duplex scanner. It will be worth the investment. The DocuMate 150 has a duplex cousin, the DocuMate 152, which costs about $100 more and will do a great job of scanning both sides of the document. Here is a quick comparison of the two scanners:

If you have used the the Xerox DocuMate 150 or the Xerox DocuMate 152, let us know what you think about them and if you are able to achieve a paperless dream.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Document Scanners, Product Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.