Scanner of the Month

BancTec S Series Takes On Color And Sorting

By Penny Lunt
August 1998

BancTec (Dallas, TX 972-540-7700) reintroduced its one-year-old S Series in May at AIIM '98. We liked three things in particular among the new features added to these high-speed scanners that begin shipping in August:

1. They scan in both black and white and color. Switch from bitonal to color mode by pressing a button in the scanner software. That makes it versatile -- normally you'd have to buy two scanners to do both at high speed. In color the scanner handles 50 pages per minute. In black and white it scans up to 220 pages per minute. The hardware is capable of processing 100 color documents per minute. What's been holding it up is the driver software for the new color board, which needs to have its "scan ahead" feature fixed. When this is taken care of, the scanner will be processing one scan as it picks up the next document.

2. They now offer sorters. You can buy up to four sorters. If your documents are different sizes, the scanners can sort them by size. If your documents are all the same size but different colors, they can sort by color. Federal Express might use this feature to automatically scan and sort international forms (green and black) from domestic ones (red and black). With additional software, the scanner can sort documents by recognizing machine printed characters, handwriting, barcodes or marks.

3. They scan checks as well as documents. At 400 checks per minute bitonal, they're not as fast as the high-speed reader/transports most banks use to scan checks. They are good for applications such as remittance and tax payment processing where you need to scan checks and other documents together. Checks and documents can be intermixed.

There are many advantages to color in production scanning. Color images are easier on the eye for the data entry people who look at them all day. It's usually easier to identify a document and find specific fields in color. If a document has a faint color stamp on it, you can increase the intensity of that color on the image to improve readability. The same is true for handwriting or marks made in pale ink.

Color scanning lets you do color dropout on a mix of colors without having to separate the forms. Usually different color bulbs or filters are used to scan different color forms, which is a simple way to do dropout. But that forces you to sort your documents before scanning.

One thing that's been holding back production color scanning is price. There has been a narrow field of high-speed color scanners under $100,000. The BancTec S Series starts at just over $90,000.

The S Series Color Scanner has a 300 dpi grayscale/color image processing and scanner interface board from Picture Elements (Boulder, CO 303-444-6767) called the Imaging Subsystem Engine. This board JPEG-compresses the images 10:1 as it processes the scans.

"Compression is the key thing that allows production scanning in grayscale or color," says Louis H. Sharpe, II, president of Picture Elements. "Without that, you're just dabbling." JPEG color images tend to be about three to five times the size of bitonal images.

Doublefeed detection is provided with sensors. The scanner has a flat paper path and a vacuum transport (rather than rollers) that is designed to minimize jams.

"All scanners jam -- if I told you ours didn't, I'd be lying through my teeth," acknowledges Joe Petruzella, corporate vice president, worldwide marketing at BancTec. "When a jam is likely to happen, our feeder senses it as it takes documents from the stack to the feeder."

The feeder will stop the scanner and instruct the operator to adjust the document. The feeder is also detachable, so if it breaks, the repairperson can bring a new one along and fix it onsite. If you've decided to go for color in forms processing or some other high-speed document application, this scanner is a competitively priced alternative in a market that tops out in the $200,000 range.