[Athen] Purchasing New Scanners

[Al Puzzuoli]

Hello everyone,
We are upgrading much of our technology this summer, and scanners seem to be the question of the day. We are looking to purchase several categories of scanner:

*         Several high capacity units for ebook production

*         A couple scanners for use by students in our technology lab

*         Small, space saving desktop scanners for use by our staff when scanning documentation, etc.


For ebook production we currently have several Canon DR5010s. They have served us well, but it appears there is no supported driver for Windows 8 X64. Has anyone had any luck shoehorning the Windows 7 driver  into Windows 8 and making it work? If not, what replacement models should we consider?  We're also debating whether one scanner per production workstation is the most efficient approach, or whether we should consider a couple networked scanners instead.

Scanners for student use pose another interesting question. I believe this class of scanner is obviously still important ; However having said that, we've seen usage decrease considerably over the past few years. It seems that nowadays students are still making heavy use of OCR, but most of what they OCR is PDF and not paper. Our current student scanners are Ebson flatbeds with document feeders. I'm wondering how important the feeders are anymore? It seems that if a student did need to scan more than a few pages, they would be better served to just give the packet to us for production.

In terms of scanners for staff, we're probably looking at small, upright models  with sheet feeders , something like the Canon imageFORMULA p-215,or maybe something a bit bigger and more robust.

Thoughts on any of these situations would be very much welcomed.
Thanks in advance,

Al Puzzuoli
Michigan State University
Information Technologist                                       http://www.rcpd.msu.edu
Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities  517-884-1915 120 Bessey Hall East Lansing, MI  48824-1033















-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/pipermail/athen-list/attachments/20130606/065a1940/attachment.html>