Deskew and photos on a document scanner

Hi all,

I am looking for a documentscanner to archive many documents. Some of these are regular
lettersize, others are thin paper @ 1/3rd letter size, abt 10.000 are indexcard sized
cardstock(thick paper), color handwritten and printed pictures which all have just a bit
different size - no two are the same. Many documents have information on both sides
sometimes with stickers pasted on them.

All this makes for a wide range of documents to process with challenges to get the quality
somewhat right. I started archiving using my trusty old HP 5370 with Vuescan which works
well as long as I am careful in how I put the pages but it is way to slow in getting
everything scanned and filed during my lifetime without giving up living a life. So now
that documentscanners have reached a reasonable pricepoint I am considering purchasing one
and archiving more so the original documents can be boxed and stored away from
prime-space. After searching various sites and reviews I had decided to check into the
Kodak I-1220 duplex scanner over the Canon DR-2580 and the Fujitsu FI-5120 because of the
praised feeder, image quality and ability to scan plastic cards.

I tested one (on the cardstock, different sizes) but found that the ADF did not pull all
documents straight through. The deskew option could straighten this up though, however it
cut off parts of the top/bottom images - or maybe those parts were never scanned. I am
not quite sure why and the store did not have a good explanation. I assume this is
because the scanner only scans when the paperrollers detect paper. Because the
paperrollers are "somewhat" in the middle of the scanner when paper is skewed a corner of
the paper would already be past the roller and at the end the final corner would not be
scanned yet (hopefully you understand what I mean here). The result is that sometimes the
corners of documents are not in the scanned image. These corners do however hold part of
the information needed. I was truly disappointed by what I saw or maybe my expectations
were too high and this is the state of current technology...

Now my questions:
Is this phenomenon a driver issue which can be corrected - if so how? - or is this a
hardware issue which cannot be corrected?
Do all ADF document scanners in this pricerange have this problem or are the Canon or
Fujitsu better in this regard?
Are there any other scanners which don't have this problem - they need to be able to scan
thick postcards?
Do (affordable) flatbed scanners exist with a duplex option (without ADF) with enough
scanning speed?
Is there some forum besides the newsgroup where these questions would be more appropriate?

Thanks in advance for reading this, sharing your thoughts and answering my questions!

Joe.

 

Don,

thanks for the constructive suggestions. I will take all these into account however, I am
not (yet) convinced that a documentscanner with duplex cannot to job I like to do -
especially with for some of the tasks OCR recognision on keywords. Yes you are correct on
the quality, however the Kodak's for example are apparently being used by photostores to
scan shoeboxes of old photographs. I would assume they would not do so if the quality
were bad.

Yes, a consistent workflow and a consistent operator: me ) - not the most consistent
person in the world are absolutely required.

But the biggest issue for me as of now is the "de-skew" on a documentscanner.... Still
looking for people wanting to share their experiences... scantips.com did not help me on
this.....