NeatDesk Scanner: Sort, Scan, Save
We like scanners- from the fingerprint kind to the more conventional. And we liked the NeatReceipts scanner, which did one thing and did it well.
Their new model does more- handling business cards and documents of all kinds- and aims to be the “central inbox” for your papers, simplifying your filing and making everything electronic. The NeatDesk is fairly small and reasonably attractive, and can handle both sides of anything paper that you feed it. It’s easy to hook up to any regular PC, though Mac OSX is not supported at the moment- representatives tell me that support for Mac OSX will be coming this spring.
But the most important part of a scanner is the software. And the new version (4.0) is a bit slow, and though the OCR was pretty accurate, it didn’t perform as well as the recently-reviewed ScanSnap. We had issues with it failing to properly read text off of documents that had been scanned at an angle (which the feeder is likely to do when dealing with documents of varied sizes), and it seemed to have a hard time with some fonts that the ScanSnap could handle. On the other hand, it can export to a wide range of formats, including PDF and Excel.
At $400 or more, it’s a fairly pricey item, but the feeder can handle 50 pages and the color scanning is nice. They are regularly improving the software, and we hope that some of the kinks can be worked out in future releases or upgrades- especially images of the scans themselves, which are difficult to work with. As long as you aren’t scanning pictures, the NeatDesk definitely deserves a look, and a space on your desk.
