Visioneer Road Warrior Scanner

I looked closely at the NeatReceipts scanner before deciding on this one, but think made the right call.
I have been a Visioneer fan for some time, and I saw one of the Strobes used in my doctor's office and have been interested in one ever since.
The Strobes were overpriced so I never bought one, but broke down and got this one. I figured this was the low end of their line, since the documentation is for the RoadWarrior and the Strobe 100, but when I called Visioneer they told me this one has all the latest hardware in it and buying one of the other models would be a step backward. That made me feel better at least.

I should explain my decision: I used Quicken religiously and have always wanted a way to easily attach receipts to Quicken entries. (Older versions of Quicken had ways to, but they were all iffy and imperfect. Quicken 2007 does allow more direct scanning, although it, too, is pathetic but workable and does work with this scanner). I mention this because it seemed to me that the NeatReceipts scanner's claim to fame is that it reads the receipts and stores them and you can search by them. That's not ultimately what I need. My data is already sorted and I don't need to OCR the receipts--just store them for when I want to see them. Plus, buying this scanner got me PaperPort 11 (I have been using 9, refusing to upgrade due to cost) at no additional cost, which I do use extensively also. A two-for-one deal!

The scanner is actually quite nice. It may not be perfect, or a flatbed, but when I truly look at what I want one for, this is it. I've scanned over 200 receipts with it already and dozens of other documents. It's not as bulky or hard to place on my limited desk space as my old flatbed scanner (Visioneer 9320-USB). Plus, there's no "warm up" time which I always hated.

However, on the flip side, After the unit scans the document quite quickly, it pops up "Converting", which does take way too long for my taste. For a scan that takes say 10 seconds (for an 8.5x11), the conversion process takes 20-30. I THINK that time is dependent on what format you choose to scan to (i.e. Searchable PDFs take longer than PDFs), but I haven't found a format that just "pops" in to Paperport without conversion (I'll note here when you scan from Quicken 2007 into Quicken there is no conversion time--I like that!)

I have also scanned more than a few color photographs with this unit that have come out nicely. I was afraid this was mostly a B&W scanner, but it does well with color as well it seems.

As for difficulties feeding, I can say it is an art. I get more straight than crooked, and Paperport does do a good job straightening them for you, but it is annoying to have to start over. I wouldn't let that "quirk" of this hardware deter you from choosing this unit.

All in all, I am pleased with this purchase and would recommend it to others considering it.

I bought this scanner for my wife who originally just wanted something to scan in her recipe collection. I was torn between purchasing the RoadWarrior and the Pentax DS Mobile 600. I'm glad I bought this one. The software description of the Pentax is rather scant, so it's hard to compare, but I believe the RoadWarrior wins in terms of flexibility. After using it for a while, my wife wanted to scan in her business card collection. The included BizCard application worked great. She also found the need to scan and OCR documents into Word. No problem. Photos...piece of cake. It has handled every task that we have thrown at it.

Some have complained about the difficulty of getting the scanner to feed straight. We have largely solved that problem by increasing the paper pickup delay to the max setting (1.25 seconds). Also the auto-straightening software is sometimes confused when the original contains a diagonal edge, but that feature is easily turned off.

Cons: When I first installed the scanner, I could not get it to calibrate properly and the scans had light streaks. I called Visioneer tech support and they guided me through downloading and installing a fix from their web site. After that things worked great. The software is a bit clunky (too many mouse clicks to get to the setting you want to change), but you get used to it.

As far as hardware requirements go, my wife runs this on a mini-ITX system with a rather weak processor (1 GHz Via processor, 256 MB). The software performs well even in that environment.

One last piece of advice: when creating pdfs, use the Paperport desktop as the destination for the scan rather than Acrobat Reader. It is much easier to stack and unstack things there as well as do other forms of editing like annotation and cropping.

This scanner is a great little portable mobile scanning tool. The OneTouch software is wonderful; it scans directly to an application or a file (I use it for PDF's mainly) without ANY intervention. Simply inserting the paper starts the process and in seconds the document is on the PC. I've found the size, USB powered featurer and travel case wonderful for taking it alongside my laptop where it makes quick work of receipts. The scan speed is not as fast as desktop ADF but works well for portable use.

I tried the Neat Receipts solution but it was awfully slow, required very convoluted and large software components and much more complicated than this. Highly recommended for any mobile scanning use.