SCAN Station

Ricoh IS450DE is Gentle On Your Documents

Fed consistent letter paper, the IS450DEıs paper path worked smoothly and efficiently with no doublefeeds. The rollers are wide and spongy, which helps the ADF grab the paper. It did doublefeed thin paper on occasion, but this is typical in the mid-speed market.

I also liked this scannerıs price ($7,695 including a post-scan endorser but not including a $900 image processing board) and its image quality. Scans were sharp, faithfully reproducing type as small as six points.

The IS450DE picked up light handwriting, even in pencil and pastel-colored pen. It did lose light dot matrix type, especially on a form with carbon residue. Turning on ıenhance light charactersı made the image too noisy. Background removal took away the characters, too. Few scanners can handle these types of difficult forms well.

The background removal worked cleanly on colored paper with clear text printed on top. This scanner can output files in 256 levels of grayscale, and this worked very well. The text was legible and the photos retained some detail. Grayscale is a good option to have, especially if you have documents with photos or stamps on them that you need to be able to read.

The scanner has dynamic thresholding in the hardware. I didnıt notice a huge difference in quality when I used this feature, but it is a good feature to have. There may be specific types of documents on which this would make all the difference.

The IS450ıs document size detection feature is handy. Your image is always the same size as the original document, you donıt have to crop and you donıt waste file space by having images that are larger than the actual documents.

This scanner passed its speed test with flying colors, handling about four more pages per minute than its rating when there were no problems. While it didnıt mangle the paper, it did jam on some mixed batches. Again, this is a common challenge for midrange scanners. That means you always have to batch and prepare paper before scanning with them. Other scanners in this range include the Fujitsu 3097DE (39 ppm, $6,995) and the Panasonic KV-S2055 (50 ppm, $9,000).

A flatbed and a 150-page automatic document feeder make the IS450DE very versatile. It can scan almost anything 11ı x 17ı or smaller. It also has a standard endorser, useful for those who want to better track their documents. It works after scanning, so the numbers you endorse your pages with wonıt appear on the images.

The scanner has a start button on it that lets you walk up and use the scanner without going through the software. That can be a time saver. Its small footprint (18.8ı X 27ı) means this scanner should fit in just about any environment. Itıs fairly quiet, too, so it wonıt disturb your neighbors.

It comes standard with a SCSI-2 interface and ISISand TWAIN compliant software drivers.

Considering all its features and strengths, I would recommend the Ricoh IS450DE scanner for its price/performance ratio, its smooth paper path and its quality bitonal images.