Xerox DocuMate 152 XDM152D-WU Duplex Sheetfed Document Scanner

Pros: Twain, fast, cheap

Cons: Takes forever to warm up. Sometimes needs to be turned off and on to get its act together.

Other Thoughts: Used in a medical office. Not really good for scanning in a fast paced environment like the reception area, but ok for scanning smaller correspondence in the back office. If you're looking for something fast and reliable that doesn't crash or take forever to warm up, go with the more expensive Fujitsu FI series.

Pros: Very easy to use. Love the feature that you can separate or combine pages.

Cons: Wish it didn't take as long to heat up.

Pros: Very fast, and the latest revisions of the driver package are very customizable. I've scanned thousands of documents with this, without significant problems, and would highly reccomend it to anyone looking to go paperless.

Cons: Two bugs appear occasionally:
- Sometimes it fails to engage the first page of a document. This can be fixed tapping the page, and later, adjusting (bending) the small pad towards the document to pull it more firmly. It also comes with a spare pad in case this one wears out.
- The drivers occasionally crash. I scan 200 pages per week, and maybe once per week, it will crash mid-doc, and I will have to start it over.
- The drivers don't compress PDFs much. If a document is large, I often re-save it in adobe and save 30%.

Other Thoughts: ScanSoft PaperPort is just OK. The merge/explode features are handy, but the icon sizes are too small when dealing with many many documents.

It will not scan documents longer than legal. Long expense receipts cannot be saved with this scanner, without tearing them in half and taping them to a legal page.

Pros: Scans -supposed to be...

Cons: Take my advice and do not buy. Paper jams and it is serious. And all started after maybe 20 scans.
Whoever designed this hardware, that person should be fired. And it is so frustrating when I see QC sticker.

Other good reviewers; maybe they are the luckiest people and should buy a lotto ticket.

Other Thoughts: This is my third unit. Bought again hoping they have fixed paper sensor problem after reading reviews here 4 wks ago. First and second one; no paper errors, third one now chewing papers. Never had this much problems with Kodak, Canon and Fujitsu scanners. Spend a little more and get the real one... I learned a lesson.

Pros: Does everything we need it to do-- good quality, good speed, great scanning options, DUPLEX, hardly ever jams/misfeeds, easy to maintain, small footprint, included software is decent (for windows/PC), document feeder is a MUST!

Cons: no good MacOS support-- had to find (and pay for) 3rd party software to be able to connect it to my partner's Mac-- but we knew that when we chose it. I wish the document feeder were bigger, but we've figured a decent work-around (see Other Thoughts, below). I wish the included SW offered the option to pause/resume a scan-to-pdf or included some minimal PDF-editing capabilities, but there have been plenty of 3rd party (freeware!) options for that...

Other Thoughts: My partner and I have scanned and stored MULTIPLE FILING CABINETS full of papers and records with our DM152, and we LOVE it. We scan to PDF at 150 or 200 dpi, greyscale, duplex / skip blanks, Legal size / autocrop. It's fast (maybe 2 or 3 seconds per piece of paper!), and the document feeder is 95% awesome. Although the document feeder is designed for 50 sheets, nothing stops us from introducing 30 more sheets once it gets through the first 30 (effectively loading it on the fly). We regularly scan 200+ page files this way, with minimal attention. It took a little finesse to learn how much/deep/gently to add the additional pages (to minimize jamming), but this is now a regular occurance. The autofeeder can be adjusted to accomodate a wide range of source-sizes, but it dislikes being fed multiple different sources in the same batch. That (and the errant staple we fail to remove) are the source of jams, always easily fixed-- pop down the front and pull out the paper-- voila!

Pros: When it does work, it scan fast.

Cons: Scanner doesn't feed properly. Jams almost every time. Cannot process the amount of paper it claims it can. When it does scan, it works fast and great. But it doesn't, therefore it sucks.

Pros: Scans well. Software is not obtrusive or annoying.

Cons: The power supply chirps to the blink of the power LED when the scanner is in sleep mode. Called support, they are sending a new power supply. Scan button quit working after a week, I initiate scans from the software now.

Other Thoughts: Power switch is on the back, no biggie but annoying when I have to constantly turn it off due to chirping power supply.

Pros: When it works, it works.

Cons: Constantly have to turn it off and turn it on to get it to initialize and start, other wise you push button that does nothing.

You click the scan button on 300dpi and up, it starts out like it JAMMED - Scares Dickinson out of you. It's not, it shifting gears or something. Next no indication light that doing anything or on error occurred, the RED LIGHT OF DEATH.

"If the person is not logged in 100% it doesn't work", YOU CAN NOT use screen saver or switch users, 100% security risk if you want 24/7 scanner, require to leave desk top open and free to take over format your hard drive.

The default software is HANDICAPPED forcing you to purchase an UPGRADE so you can adjust brightness and contrast. Like buying TV with out volume nobs.

Other Thoughts: If you want all purpose system, with a single purchase, then this is not for you.

Pros: The scanner works great. I have always used Paperport and this scanner hooks right up to it. I did 3 hours of scanning with my old scanner and this one took 15 minutes. To me time is money. For a small office it works great. I do computer work for some offices and I just order another one for them. I would not buy this one if I was going to run it all day everyday then I would go for the 162. No jamming problems at all. The duplexing is great a lot of my bills are double sided and this does a great job. I also had no problems with the drivers and the one touch.

Cons: If you are looking for a picture scanner to me a flatbed works best. This scanner will do them but i think the quality is a little off for color images.

Other Thoughts: For a all around good scanner I think this will do for a small office

Pros: One touch PDF conversion of your documents. Fairly easy software to get your documents after scan. I highly recommend this for anyone who has to archive or fax documents. Don't know why I went so long without it. Fast simplex or duplex scanning and conversion to pdf.

Cons: Did not work on my Dell laptop with XP. Initially I bought the all-in-one Canon pixma Mx330 -that was a piece of junk (paper jam constantly when faxing more than 8 documents). Anyway, had a bit of trouble installing the software, but finally got it installed. Then, tested one touch pdf scanning and it seemed to work. With initial test I figured everything was fine. The next day, tried to scanned my documents but couldn't. The scanner itself did the scan, but scanned documents never appeared on my computer nor did Paperport software that was supposed to popup did. Found out later that the files where in my "c:/documents and settings/../local" settings/temp folder with a funky name of ~xxx.pdf. Anyways almost toss the unit out the window then gave it one more try and installed in on my desktop with windows 7. Lo and behold everything worked perfect. Never had a problem ever since -but on my desktop and have been happily scanning away and saving trees! I hope this helps some one!

Other Thoughts: It's a great scanner if you get it installed, not sure why it did not work on my 8 year Dell laptop (maybe its time for a new laptop). I would recommend it!