SCAN Station

By Harvey Spencer

Good Value for Consistent Docs

The KV-S2055 is a 50 ppm, 100-to-400-dpi duplex unit capable of scanning anything from business cards to 11ıx17ı sheets of paper. It is compact (23ıx18ı) and easily fits on a desktop. It is interfaced through SCSI and comes standard with 8MB of RAM, which you can increment up to 64MB using standard SIMM memory. If you are scanning in grayscale or in duplex at 400 DPI, you will need to add memory or the performance will slow down.

There are a mass of features. You can scan in black and white or grayscale from 4 to 8 bit. An auto-differentiation feature lets the scanner identify photographs and automatically dither them according to a selected pattern. An LCD panel provides feedback to the operator. All controls such as contrast, brightness and DPI can be set either through the panel or in software.

We tested the KV-S2055 with the Pixel Translations ISIS driver. Image quality was impressive although the auto-threshold capability did not work as well as anticipated. I found it better to turn it off and adjust the contrast and brightness. You can adjust these for each side separately.

The new line from Panasonic is unique in using an LED light source. This provides a very pure light source with little noise and even illumination across the paper. Each side has both red and green selectable through the control panel. The green LEDs are used for normal scanning, while the red can be selected for red forms dropout. Selection affects both sides so you cannot drop out red on one side of the form and scan the other normally.

I expected the green LEDs to be blind to green ink, but interestingly they were completely blind to yellow and some orange hues. The scanner has a white background, so folded papers might not be detected from the image QC. Panasonic says they are working with Kofax to include Virtual ReScan, which will resolve this issue.

The paper is center-fed by rollers in a U direction from bottom to top, and it turns the paper over to keep it in the order it was scanned. A separate straight-through operation allows for cards or envelopes. Jams are easy to remove -- you can expose the whole transport by opening a couple of covers.

A five-position switch allows the gap to be adjusted for different paper thicknesses. The autofeeder (which can take up to 300 sheets) worked very well on consistent letter bond. However, it double fed onionskin, shiny paper and mixed documents.

The scanner has double-feed detection as well as an optional imprinter. If you see the double-feed alarm on the panel, you can easily flip through an imprinted batch to find the page the scanner missed.

The autofeed rollers are snap-out replaceable by the operator. A counter included in the scanner helps the operator decide when to change them. Itıs recommended that this should be every 300,000 sheets with cleaning every 100,000. Based on my experience, I think you may need to do both more often.

The optional front-side inkjet imprinter can be placed either pre- or post-scan. It is movable laterally so as to avoid printing over sensitive information. It uses the H-P head used by most scanner manufacturers. Under program control it can print alpha-numeric characters including date and sequence number. Because it is in-line it does not slow down the scanner. I prefer pre-scan to post because it allows easy reference from the image to the physical paper (the endorsement is on the image). I consider this $1,559 option a nice feature thatıs a good idea to buy.

Adding to its litany of features, the KV-S2055 can identify and output the angle of skew, detect page size and automatically adjust the image size to match and it can reverse the image. It can read up to six levels of patch codes or barcodes, which is useful for batch scanning and automatic indexing. You can have up to five barcodes on each side of a page.

I like this scanner a lot. Itıs attractively priced with a wide range of features. Once properly fed, the pages moved smoothly and the image quality was excellent. TWAIN and ISIS drivers let it interface to most systems. At under $10,000 itıs a great value, but some tweaking to the autofeeder would help it handle mixed documents as well as it does consistent batches.

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