Desktop scanners are a niche product, to be clear. For many people, an average multi-function all-in-one printer/scanner combo machine is enough. And the shift towards the digital world means that there should be less paper to worry about. But that’s actually the critical thing- we still fill out forms by hand, and it needs to get processed and saved for digital management. Lawyers and doctors, bankers and real estate agents, or basically anywhere that bureaucracy requires paper, will be well-served by having a fast, efficient desktop scanner.
Which brings us to the Xerox DocuMate 6440, the latest in their long line of solutions. It’s one of the quickest we’ve ever seen in this class, capable of scanning more than 50 pages a minute (rated at up to 120 in fact). And with a stated daily duty cycle of 6000 pages per day, you can be sure it’s built to handle even the most serious document dumps. This model supports most every major Windows operating system, all the way back to XP and forward to Windows 10, but isn’t fully OSX compatible. The software set includes every major application you could want, all of the industry standards- Nuance OmniPage Ultimate, PowerPDF and PaperPort as well as Visioneer’s OneTouch and Acuity.
We’ve seen other Xerox scanners, from portable models to desktop ones and combos. We liked the color scheme on this one, and though larger than some previous versions, still fits nicely on a desktop. There’s a built-in slot for ID cards, room for 80 pages in the automated document feeder, and it uses USB 2.0 so should work with just about every computer. Scans can be just about any format too, from searchable PDFs, TXTs and DOCs, to a variety of image types including BMP, JPEG, PNG, TIFF.
We missed having a business card scanning program, but that’s about the only thing absent. Acuity, especially, is a sharp improvement from some other software we’ve tested in the past and does a great job at cleaning up dirty or creased pages. And the optical character recognition here is excellent, among the best we’ve seen, making quick work of even non-English characters and some difficult fonts we tried. Of course, not everyone needs cutting edge tech to handle their old files, but for speed and efficiency, we’re quite satisfied with the Xerox DocuMate 6440. Available now, expect to spend around $428 online and in stores, well-priced for this capability set.
