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Visioneer StrobePro Sheetfed Scanner

Visioneer StrobePro Sheetfed Scanner

List Price: $199.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Sadly lagging nbehind Macintosh OS developments
Review: A very handy product when we were on Mac OS 9. Sadly, Visioneer has not seen fit to keep the software up to date for OS X. It will still work in classic mode, but uncomfortably. The software for image editing shows its age. Visigo™ A4 Mac by Ambir is said to be able to take its place for OS X.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Wonderful Compact Scanner
Review: First of all I work for an I.T. department and we have installed these little (and I do mean little) scanners on nearly 40 computers, and they all work wonderfully. The visioneer strobe pro is an excellent solution for a company looking to get rid of all of their bulky flatbed scanners. Out of the 35-40 people that have the strobe pro connected to their computer all of them have been comepletely satisfied with the product. The scanner scans paper fairly fast (3-5 seconds) if you are doing low resolution B&W pages. The scanner will scan color, but it takes considerably longer to scan the sheet, especially at higher resolutions. Even at the highest resolution the picture isn't the most superb thing in the world to look at, but it does the job. I recommend this scanner to people that are looking for something to scan in important documents, newspaper clippings, and old photos (as a hobby not professionally). These make great scanners for secretaries that do a lot of scanning, or even company historians. The scanner is very durable, and withstands a ton of dust and humidity. The only real big downside to this scanner is it is only compatible with Windows XP in USB mode.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Wonderful Compact Scanner
Review: First of all I work for an I.T. department and we have installed these little (and I do mean little) scanners on nearly 40 computers, and they all work wonderfully. The visioneer strobe pro is an excellent solution for a company looking to get rid of all of their bulky flatbed scanners. Out of the 35-40 people that have the strobe pro connected to their computer all of them have been comepletely satisfied with the product. The scanner scans paper fairly fast (3-5 seconds) if you are doing low resolution B&W pages. The scanner will scan color, but it takes considerably longer to scan the sheet, especially at higher resolutions. Even at the highest resolution the picture isn't the most superb thing in the world to look at, but it does the job. I recommend this scanner to people that are looking for something to scan in important documents, newspaper clippings, and old photos (as a hobby not professionally). These make great scanners for secretaries that do a lot of scanning, or even company historians. The scanner is very durable, and withstands a ton of dust and humidity. The only real big downside to this scanner is it is only compatible with Windows XP in USB mode.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Use some sense...
Review: GOOD review follows! First, this is NOT the best choice for PERFECT scans of photos or fragile documents. It does a perfectly adequate job with snapshots and newspaper clippings, an EXCEPTIONAL job with color or B/W letter-size material. It scans for fliing/fax, OCR or color images, up to 600 DPI.

If you are careful, you can easily feed sheets into this device without trouble. Be patient. It has an included software application that allows scanning multiple succesive sheets to one document, for convienence...but you can separate the pages later! Cool. Or you can group different scans to one document later. Cooler!

The image editing software is pretty darn good. Why? Because it has a decent selection of tools while not being overly complicated to use. You can use it as a desktop-type filing system too.

Some versions of the "Paperport" software export scans to PDF! If you understand what that means, you'll jump for joy...

But you know where the Strobe REALLY excels? You can quickly scan a document, drag it to Word and have about 95% immediately recognized as an editable Word file. Very little re-typing. How many times do you need some information IN your computer at school or work that exists only in a printed form? Wow! And you did this in about 30 seconds...

The Strobe is not perfect, but it does many jobs well enough to overlook that it is not the best solution of any ONE job. But it's the 90% solution for a TON of jobs! Buy it. You will not regret it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Use some sense...
Review: GOOD review follows! First, this is NOT the best choice for PERFECT scans of photos or fragile documents. It does a perfectly adequate job with snapshots and newspaper clippings, an EXCEPTIONAL job with color or B/W letter-size material. It scans for fliing/fax, OCR or color images, up to 600 DPI.

If you are careful, you can easily feed sheets into this device without trouble. Be patient. It has an included software application that allows scanning multiple succesive sheets to one document, for convienence...but you can separate the pages later! Cool. Or you can group different scans to one document later. Cooler!

The image editing software is pretty darn good. Why? Because it has a decent selection of tools while not being overly complicated to use. You can use it as a desktop-type filing system too.

Some versions of the "Paperport" software export scans to PDF! If you understand what that means, you'll jump for joy...

But you know where the Strobe REALLY excels? You can quickly scan a document, drag it to Word and have about 95% immediately recognized as an editable Word file. Very little re-typing. How many times do you need some information IN your computer at school or work that exists only in a printed form? Wow! And you did this in about 30 seconds...

The Strobe is not perfect, but it does many jobs well enough to overlook that it is not the best solution of any ONE job. But it's the 90% solution for a TON of jobs! Buy it. You will not regret it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Paperport Scanner
Review: I first fell in love with the Paperport when I bought my PowerMac at home - when I got the Mac in the office I bought one then for the office. Unfortunately for a while I couldn't find them for the Wintel machines. Setting up the Human Resource Database at work I wanted to utilize something quick for scanning and emailing. I was lucky enought to find the Paperport again. So far I have purchased 4 for the office and it keeps growing. They are great - easy, small so doesn't take up much room. I am now considering getting one for my home WINTEL machine. I would recommend for everyone who hates paperwork. A great archiving machine - easy to scan and send documents via e mail. For scanning photos I would probably rate it a 2 or 3, althought I have done it in the past, they don't come out bad. But documents can be scanned and imported into a PDF document or whatever you want. Import into a paint/draw program. I can't say enough about this product.
Happy with my paperport

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Flimsy, unreliable
Review: I was looking for a solution to get rid of all those bills and paperwork that I had to keep close to my computer. The Visioneer StrobePro promised a lot: compact, fast scanning with document management software, and it prmoised to work on my iMac.

After upacking, everything looked fine, including the simple to use installation cards. Hooking it up was a breeze, and within three minutes everything was ready to go. After powering on and popping the CD-ROM in the drive, software installation was a snap. So far so good.

My first sheet (letter) was a complete success, so I was happy. The software launched automatically when inserting the sheet, and paperport looks decent enough to get the job done. Happiness was short lived. On the second page the adjustment for feed-through or curl-up came loose! It turned out one of the tabs that keeps it in place was broken, and looking at the construction, that is no surprise: the construction is way too flimsy, this to me clearly is a glaring design error. There was no other (visible) damage that might suggest rough handling. However the execution by Visioneer is lacking.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Wont' work reliably on Win2000 or XP
Review: This is a great little scanner, when it works. It works in conjunction with PaperPort, and the two are just a great combination. Just stick a piece of paper in, and it will run it through, then bring up PaperPort where you can categorize it and group it with other pages of the same document.

For instance, you scan in 10 pages of a contract, then, in PaperPort, you just drag the pages on top of each other, and title them as a group. You can also drag the pages to an FTP icon, an Archive icon (which puts them somewhere in the file system), an email icon, a print icon, etc.

BUT, here's the problem --

The system seems designed for Windows 95 or Windows 98. I have tried to install it on Windows XP Pro and Windows 2000 with no luck. It's a wrestling match to get it working, then when you do, it will spontaneously reboot the machine mid-scan. I am using the latest driver, downloaded from Visioneer.

To be fair, maybe I have defective hardware and this isn't a wide-scale design problem. It sure is disappointing, however, because when it works, it's a dream. With this unit, we're one step closer to the vaunted "paperless office."

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Wont' work reliably on Win2000 or XP
Review: This is a great little scanner, when it works. It works in conjunction with PaperPort, and the two are just a great combination. Just stick a piece of paper in, and it will run it through, then bring up PaperPort where you can categorize it and group it with other pages of the same document.

For instance, you scan in 10 pages of a contract, then, in PaperPort, you just drag the pages on top of each other, and title them as a group. You can also drag the pages to an FTP icon, an Archive icon (which puts them somewhere in the file system), an email icon, a print icon, etc.

BUT, here's the problem --

The system seems designed for Windows 95 or Windows 98. I have tried to install it on Windows XP Pro and Windows 2000 with no luck. It's a wrestling match to get it working, then when you do, it will spontaneously reboot the machine mid-scan. I am using the latest driver, downloaded from Visioneer.

To be fair, maybe I have defective hardware and this isn't a wide-scale design problem. It sure is disappointing, however, because when it works, it's a dream. With this unit, we're one step closer to the vaunted "paperless office."

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Look Out
Review: This Scanner is notorious for having to reboot the computer to get it to work. We are running them on XP Professional Machines. I would only recommend this scanner for occasional use. I Do not recommend buying if you scan more than a few images a day.


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