Archive for the ‘Document Scanners’ Category

WSJ Reviews Some Home Office Paper Technologies

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

The Wall Street Journal recently reviewed a couple of pieces of hardware that you could use to help you manage your paper in your home office. Katherine Boehret looked at the PlanOn System Solutions Inc.’s $300 PrintStik PS905ME (a printer) and the ScanSnap S1300 (a scanner). While she liked the small size of each, she did not love either device. The small printer sounds like it comes with a number of drawbacks, including using a funny + expensive thermal paper and printing on paper that comes in a single, long roll.

She appreciated the ScanSnap’s software because it is very easy to use and install. Katherine’s main complaint on the ScanSnap is that it is probably not good at handling old or fragile documents. I’d agree with this, but point out that even OfficeDrop’s expensive industrial scanners are not meant for fragile paper. Instead, we flatbed these materials - as should you. I’ve got an older ScanSnap on my desk, and while it does not provide the same level of beautiful scans as our multi-thousand dollar scanners, it does a great job for the size and price. We continue to recommend ScanSnaps to our customers who want to do their own scanning.

Top Nine of ‘09

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

We’re all looking forward to the New Year here at OfficeDrop, but have found ourselves thinking back on the events of the last 12 months. To bring closure to the passing year, we’ve compiled a list of the top 9 most helpful/ popular blog posts of 2009.

Our Top Nine of ‘09:

1. OfficeDrop Scans Google QR Code

Google brought about a new level of business advertising with the new QR code. We showed you how to scan your code and spread your business. You’ll be sure to see more of the QR code in 2010.

2. How Long Should I Save Tax Documents?

OfficeDrop makes storage of your tax documents easy and hassle free, but how long are you meant to hang on to this information? This post was especially popular and will become especially helpful come April.

3. Scanning Documents to OfficeDrop using Snow Leopard and Preview

Apple’s new OS made document scanning easier by allowing you to scan, view and correct files through the image preview. In this helpful blog post we provide a video informing you of how to get the most out of document scanning with Snow Leopard.

4. Steps to Create the Paperless Office

Going paperless is both productive for your office, and friendly toward the environment. In this blog post we’ve provided you with some important steps to move you in a paperless direction.

5. Count Your Documents (Series)

In our ‘count your documents’ series of blog posts, we help you answer the question “how much paper do I have?” You can use these guides to determine the paper count in your boxes, shelves, cabinets and unbound paper.

6. Online, DVD, USB, and Hard Drive: Finding the Best Storage Medium for Your Digital Documents

There are a lot of ways to store your digital documents. This post will give you a price breakdown of each option, and description of when each is most effective.

7. OfficeDrop Launches Information Site on Document Scanning Services

Some big news of ‘09 was the launch of Documentscanningservice.com. Powered by OfficeDrop, Document Scanning Service is a free resource for those who want to know all the facts on document scanning.

8. Remember Everything, including paper, with OfficeDrop and Evernote

At OfficeDrop, we are really happy to have integrated with Evernote. With OfficeDrop and Evernote, you can get to your scanned documents without an internet connection. Find out how to use OfficeDrop and Evernote!

9. OfficeDrop iPhone Interface: The other side of ubiquitous capture

These days, mobile access is huge. OfficeDrop offers a mobile optimized web page so you can access all of your documents on the go on your iphone.

Those are our top nine of ‘09. Hope you found them helpful. Let us know your thoughts on OfficeDrop, blog topics, or the past year by commenting below!

Scanning Documents to Pixily using Snow Leopard and Preview

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Part of the many minor enhancements in Apple’s new Snow Leopard OS are the changes to the Preview Application. To quote Apple “Snow Leopard simplifies scanning by putting scanned data directly into Preview. Now you can scan, view, and correct your files and images in Preview. The scanning interface even detects the placement of images or documents on the scanner to automate the selection of regions to scan.”

I took it for a test-drive and it is fairly intuitive. I put together a 1-minute video (the quick and not too dirty kind, so pardon any jagged edges in the fonts) to show the steps involved in Scanning from Preview and sending it to your pixilymail email account. I used a HP OfficeJet for this, but the menu and clicks should be the same for pretty much any other scanner. The only item we recommend that you select a non-default is to choose 300 dpi during the scanning, so that the OCR quality is pretty good. You may use defaults for other settings and let OfficeDrop do the heavy-lifting for everything else.

Have you upgraded to Snow Leopard yet? Have you tried out this feature? Let us know what you think.

Pixily at 21st Annual NAPO Conference

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Expect to see Prasad, Vikram, and Cassandra of the OfficeDrop team at booths 400 and 402 at The National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) 21st annual conference this week in Orlando, Florida. Please be sure to stop by those booths for a free mail-in scanvelope and other goodies.

snapscanban

Partnered with Fujitsu, the team will promote OfficeDrop’s simple and efficient document management service with Fujitsu’s ScanSnap scanners. Small personal scanners capable of generating Pdfs with the push of a button.  Tell us what you think of this collaboration. Dynamic duo?

And the conference? Greener?  This year NAPO has created a Green Task Force to carry out new  “green” initiatives at the 09 conference.

Promoting green practices, Prasad, our CEO will will also be delivering a talk titled  Achieving the Paperless Dream:

Has the paperless dream been elusive?  Have the solutions you tried been more a hassle than help? Are you thinking about adopting paperless
solutions but are overwhelmed by the choices? In this session, he will distill the solutions available in the market and share tips and tricks on how
to achieve the paperless dream.

Not at the conference? A list of preregistered exhibitors can be found here.

Were you at the conference? What did you think of it? What booth or booths were most captivating and for what reasons? What speakers or keynote addresses hit home most, were most insightful? Please,  share your thoughts.

Left to right: Vikram, Cassandra, Derek, Prasad. Photo: Melanie McClurkin.

Left to right: Vikram, Cassandra, Derek, Prasad. Photo: Melanie McClurkin.

Fingerprinting paper (a.k.a Blank sheets are not really blank)

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Macworld reports that researchers at Princeton University and University College London say they can identify unique information, essentially like a magnifying-glassfingerprint, from any sheet of paper using any reasonably good scanner. Their findings will be presented at the IEEE security conference in May, 2009.

“We’ve found a way to identify documents even when there was nothing additional printed on them,” said Alex Halderman, who was part of the Princeton team. “This is like an invisible serial number printed on every piece of paper ever made.”

Isn’t this exciting? In addition to finding obvious applications such as detecting counterfeited currency notes, there could be other interesting main-stream applications related to legal contracts etc,. too. We are quite intrigued by this technology and its possible applications to our customers.

Xerox sacrifices duplex scanning to lower DocuMate Scanner to $400

Sunday, July 6th, 2008

Xerox\'s least expensive sheet-Fed Document Scanner - DocuMate 150 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.

(more…)

Copyright © 2008 Pixily. All rights reserved.

HACKER SAFE certified sites prevent over 99.9% of hacker crime. Powered by Amazon Web Services