Rating: 
Summary: Take a Pass
Review: 1. Manual & Support documetnation are lacking. I've wasted too much time & money trying to get it to work (it never did fully). 2. The quality of the scans is poor, the auto-crop does not work (adds 1.2 inches to bottom). I would be embarrassed to include these scans in a report to a client. 3. I'm sending mine back.
Rating: 
Summary: Just Keep Feeding It Paper!!!
Review: After looking around for a while I saw this. 50 pages is what the thing is supposed to hold. I've found that if you just stick in a stack that it just keeps feeding and feeding it more and more paper! I was looking and most document scanners are those cheap single sheet ones which I wasn't going to do. I don't have the time nor patience to sit there individually feeding one page at a time. It reminds me of the commercial, "set it and forget it." I really do just leave it for 5-10 minutes and come back and its done. Fantastic product for any home office!
Rating:
Summary: Works as Advertised
Review: After reading the reviews online I was somewhat leary of diving into the Scanmaker 5950. I read all 21 reviews and found that the majority of people seem to like the product, with a few getting what sounds like a bad batch of scanners. I called a few vendors and asked them if they had experienced any problems and they all said that the return rate on this product was extremely low. Taking that into consideration I gave it a try. I needed something to scan in high volumes of paper and make them into PDFs. I scan in invoices, reports and other misc documents and this product interfaces with Adobe Acrobat flawlessly. I couldn't ask for more! A+++
Rating: 
Summary: Great Scanner with Nice ADF
Review: All in all, this is a great scanner for the money. When I bought this scanner, it seemed a little too good to be true: a USB 2.0 scanner with built-in Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) for less than $200? With no reviews out yet, I was a little wary. I was happy to find that the scanner is indeed what it claims to be. It's a great unit for scanning documents, magazine clippings, etc. As this is my first scanner, I endured a short but steep learning curve, particularly in getting used to some of this scanner's unusual features. For instance, even though it is a USB 2.0 scanner, I usually use my slower (but handier) USB 1.1 port. The reason is that all documents with text (magazines, newspapers, or laser printer) seem to OCR MUCH better when I tell ScanWizard 5 (the TWAIN driver) to use black-and-white 300 DPI settings for "text documents". Even slick magazine text scans much better when I avoid the "magazine" setting and opt for "text document" setting. At these settings, USB 1.1 is plenty fast. Of course, if I were scanning photographs, then the USB 2.0 port might be a better option. Also, when I am using double-sided documents with the ADF in PaperPort, I have to remember to make sure to flip the documents and reload the ADF BEFORE hitting "scan other side". I use the scanner with PaperPort Pro 9, Omnipage Pro 12, and FineReader Pro 7.0. When I remember to use the "text" setting in the basic ScanWizard popup box, they all work flawlessly with this scanner. I think that I get slightly better results with FineReader, but OmniPage integrates transparently with PaperPort and makes scanning a breeze. I am using a Pentium III laptop with Windows XP Professional. All in all, if you want to scan documents and use OCR, this is a great scanner for the money.
Rating:
Summary: Just what I needed! Great for Docs; Not For Hi-Res
Review: As a Realtor, I have used a scanner for years to digitize, fax, and archive my documents. Until I came across this scanner, automatic document feeders were too expensive and the scanners extremely bulky. I have now had my Microtek 5950 scanner for some time and can't figure out how I lived without it. It is simple to use. It says that it will automatically feed and scan up to 50 pages at one time; I have found that with any more than about 20 or 25 pages causes it to for some reason stop after scanning 2 or 3 pages. Regardless, the scanner works perfectly for black and white and color document scanning, saving multiple pages in a single PDF document which is easy to save, email, or print to fax. I used to an Epson Perfection 2400 Photo scanner. The quality of high-resolution color photo scans on the Microtek cannot compare to the quality on the Epson. The colors are not sensed well on the Microtek, so very similar colors on a photo come out as the same color. Also, diagonal edges, even at resolutions of 720 dpi, come out pixelated and stair-stepped where on the Epson it will not. Therefore, do not purchase this scanner for the purpose of high-resolution photo scanning if these issues will be of a concern to you. Nevertheless, for what I use it for, to scan multiple documents for the purposes of archiving, faxing, and printing, I could not ask for the Microtek. I have not had any of the problems with the automatic feeder (except the issue when more than 25 pages are loaded) that the other reviewers have talked of. I should also note that at the time of the writing of this review, I found the scanner cheaper at Best Buy, but I'm sure that prices can vary with time. As with all electronics purchases, do some price shopping. Just make sure you do buy it from somebody with a good return policy like Amazon, so that if you do get a lemon you can return it. Scanners do have a high-percentage of lemons. I hope this has helped.
Rating:
Summary: Needs design work
Review: Bought one about 3-4 months ago. Tbe motor on the ADF died, making it just a flatbed scanner. Crinkles/tears the tops of pages, and occasionally misfeeds. In contrast, my Canon F50 has been well excercised, and is still going strong (although it doesn't produce PDFs). I suggest you look elsewhere for a scanner with an ADF...
Rating:
Summary: Awful Product
Review: Don't even bother wasting your time with this product or any Microtek product. This is the 4th Microtek scanner I have purchased and the 4th I have returned for a refund. The ADF won't feed pages correctly, the scanning bar hesitates and locks up, customer service is absolutely aweful. I waited (on a toll call) for almost an hour and when I finally spoke to someone, they told me it would be a week or so before they cold send me out a new scanner. In the meantime, this was the third scanner of this model I had purchased (I returned one to the on-line merchant and one to my local retailer). All of them had the same problems plus their own unique problems. Don't even do business with Microtek, they don't care.
Rating: 
Summary: Scanmaker 5950 - fiirst impressions
Review: Got my Scanmaker 5950 this morning. I was really looknig for a low-cost ADF scanner.
First thing that happended was (like many other people) that the scanning bar locked up after about 10-12%. Tried a few things but then called Microtek Customer Support. Hold time about 10 minutes. They told me to return the scanner because it was a hardware problem. BTW... I did not receive the email with the RMA and instructions yet at the end of the day.
Meanwhile however... I found the problem (that is: my problem) with the scanning bar locking up: I had placed the 5950 on top of my old scanner, and the bottom warped just the tiniest bit, causing the scanning bar to get too much friction. Now that I placed the 5950 on a flat surface, all works fine.
The only other issue I have is that occasionally the ADF feeds more than one page at the time.
Final thoughts: if the ADF feeds fine, I am getting great results. Finally a scanner/software that lets me put in a stack of paper and create a single PDF without manual intervention. Nice "quick-scan" buttons to copy, fax, email, make PDF, etc.
For the price I guess you can't really go wrong.
Rating: 
Summary: Save yourself the hassle
Review: I bought this to archive paper (like bills). The auto document feeder scans 2 pages, then says: out of memory, close programs to free up disk space. I have a brand new computer w/ 512k memory and an Athalon XP 2500 processor. This error is clearly from the Scan Wizard software the scanner comes with. I have rebooted and reinstalled to no avail. All in all I spent about 3 hours trying to scan 20 pages. Now I'm going to return it and buy the HP model with auto document feeder for $299. I guess you get what you pay for at only $140 for the Microtek 5950.
Rating:
Summary: Poor Automatic Feeder
Review: I do a lot of scanning. I purchased this scanner for business. I own an old HP scanner with feeder, a year-old Microtek flat-bed scanner with no feed, and some negative scanners---all of which I am very happy with. This is the first scanner I've ever bought that I don't like. The quality of the scans is poor. More annoying, the feeder is horrible. It doesn't pull the sheets in straight, it misses sheets, it feeds in some sheets without scanning them, or it just doesn't work at all. It also sounds like it is ripping paper. (No, it is not broken. I've checked.) In the several months that I have owned the thing, it hasn't yet done an automatic feed job correctly. I'm disappointed in Microtek on this model. The old HP does the job much better, with better quality and accuracy.
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