The DocuMate 5460, in combination with its included software, did an excellent job in terms of accuracy on our OCR tests, reading both our Times New Roman and Arial test page at sizes as small as six points without a mistake.
In real world use, depending on how fast your computer is, you may or may not see a difference in speed between the scanners when scanning to searchable PDF format. In the case of the 5460, after it scanned a few pages, it stopped after each one, and paused several seconds before the next – presumably waiting for the computer to acknowledge that it was ready for more. What the tied speed really means is not that the scanners are all the same speed for this task, but that they're all bumping up against the test computer's maximum speed for processing the pages. In my tests, all three scanners were essentially tied, at 1 minute and 16 seconds for the 5460 and the Kodak i2600, and 1 minute and 18 seconds for the Xerox 5445. Whatever advantage the 5460 has over the 5445 and Kodak i2600 is far less obvious here, because the advantage in scan speed is eclipsed by the time it takes for the recognition step. The more important speed for most purposes is the time for scanning to searchable PDF format, which is generally more useful for document management.
In real world use, given that the 7 second start time will be the same for any document, the longer the document is, the faster the overall speed in ppm will be. Similarly, I clocked a duplex scan of the same 25-sheet double-sided document at 92.3 ipm, but without the start-up time, the speed jumps to 117.6 ipm. Subtract that start-up overhead from the overall time, and the speed is a true 60 ppm. There’s a 7 second wait before the first page actually starts to move through the scanner following the command being given. The difference between claimed speed and timed throughput comes from the scanner pausing after the scan command has been given in the One Touch utility. That's certainly faster than the 5445, at 38.5 ppm, or the Kodak i2600 at 41.7 ppm, but it's well short of the claimed 60 ppm. In my tests, the DocuMate 5460 came close to its rated speed in terms of raw scan time, but some of its advantage over 45-ppm and 50-ppm scanners like the 5445 and the Kodak i2600 gets lost in overhead.įor a simplex (one-sided) scan of our standard 25-sheet text document to image PDF format, I timed the scanner at 46.9 ppm, starting from giving the scan command, and ending with the scanned document showing up in an Adobe Reader window.
As an alternative to the scan utility, Xerox also provides Twain, ISIS, and WIA drivers, which between them will let you scan directly from virtually any Windows program that includes a scan command.