March 2000

SCAN STATION:

Speedy Output, Bargain Price

By Maria Medina

The high-speed SS855D from Panasonic (www.panasonic.com/scanners) is a competitively priced production scanner with a U-shaped paper transport, but it can also travel a straight path for added scanning versatility.

This recently upgraded 85-page-per-minute workhorse is in the same league as Bell & Howell's Copiscan 75-ppm 8100 ($31,995 duplex), Fujitsu's 80-ppm 3099 EH/GH ($24,995) and Kodak's 90-ppm 7500 ($50,650 duplex — all speeds quoted in portrait orientation). Yet its price of $24,999 makes the SS855D a value choice for service bureaus and others with upper-mid-range production scanning needs.

Quick Scan Panasonic Secaucus, NJ, 201-392-6280 Product: SS855D List price: $24,999 Rated speed: 85 ppm (95 ppm as tested)/160 ipm duplex. Daily duty cycle: 10,000 Duplex support: Yes Paper capacity: 1,000 pages Strengths: Fast (better than rated) scanning and good image quality on standard documents. Smooth paper handling, even with mixed documents. Straight-through paper path feature is helpful for delicate, thick and long, continuous documents. Competitive price. Weaknesses: Length-based detection system missed certain doublefeeds. Dropout limited to red and green. Heavy backgrounds/graphics and light pencil/crayon marks present challenges. ProductInfo 206

The U-shape paper path is for high-volume jobs and mixed batches. The scanner has an output tray with movable paper guides, so paper stays in a neat pile. A flick of a lever lets you switch to a straight path out the back of the scanner. This helps with fragile paper, heavy card stock and long documents such as cardiograms, greenbar paper and geophysical reports. Opening the straight paper path slows scanning to ensure delicate handling and accurate scanning of long documents.

Panasonic's recent upgrades include softer rubber rollers said to help with paper handling. The SS855D exceeded its rated speed by more than 10%, reaching 95 ppm on letter-size documents scanned at 200 dpi. Even at this fast speed, paper handling was smooth and efficient. We didn't experience any jams, even with a stack of mixed-size documents including onion skin and card stock. If the scanner does jam, you can easily open the top and back to clear it.

We didn't experience any doublefeeds, but we did have a problem with the doublefeed detection. To test the system we taped two pages together, but the scanner didn't detect it, even after we turned this feature on in the software. Panasonic explained that detection is based on paper length (rather than thickness), so it won't detect doublefeeds if pages pass through in perfect alignment. If this is critical, order the optional post-scan endorser, which helps spot missed documents.

Image quality was impressive. Our test sheets had typed and handprinted text in pencil, black print and varying colors of ink and crayon. At 200 dpi, the scanner did extremely well on the print, capturing four-point type, six-point type and reverse-print type precisely. It lost No. 3 pencil handwriting and light crayon. At its highest resolution, the scanner managed to capture the crayon but not the light pencil.

To challenge the scanner a bit more, we fed it a really tough form with light dot matrix print on a background of stripes of blue. With some adjustments to the settings and 300-dpi resolution, the scanner picked up the text satisfactorily, but OCR would have been a problem.

Documents with heavy background colors or a mix of text and graphics were somewhat troublesome. Panasonic suggested using grayscale with heavy backgrounds (though this would impede OCR). For mixed graphics they suggested an "automatic separation" mode. This captures graphics in a dither algorithm and text in bitonal. The SS855D delivers 100- to 400-dpi resolution, and it offers grayscale levels up to 8-bit.

The SS855D has front and back CCD arrays that rely on flourescent bulbs. The standard bulb can drop out pale green, or you can replace it with a red bulb for red dropout. We would have liked to see more options for dropout colors. Like several of its competitors, the scanner offers "white level follow," which reads the first few millimeters of the page to sense the background color.

Panasonic also provides seven types of barcode control sheets that identify batches and tell the scanner if they are simplex, duplex, binary or grayscale. The scanner can read your existing barcode separator sheets and patch barcodes as well.

The SS855D offers impressive speed, smooth paper-handling and fine image quality for most business documents. The straight paper path feature gives you flexibility, and the price-to-performance ratio makes it a standout in its class.