IT Pro Verdict

The DocuMate 6440 may not have network support but Xerox’s versatile OneTouch software goes a long way to make up for this as it provides simple, one-touch scanning manoeuvres to a wide range of destinations. Add in its fast scan speeds and classy output quality and you have an ideal choice for high-demand environments.

Pros

+
Fast scan speeds; Excellent quality; Good range of output destinations

Cons

-
No network support

The DocuMate 6440 from Xerox is geared up for SMBs faced with a paper mountain, combining a fast 60ppm scan speed with a big 80-page ADF and 6,000-page daily duty cycle. Teaming this USB 2 scanner up with Xerox' OneTouch on the host PC also makes light work of automated scanning and offers an impressive range of control features.

Xerox claims 60ppm at 200dpi and 40ppm at 300dpi but in our lab tests, we found the 6440 did noticeably better than this. At 200dpi for grayscale and colour output, it scanned both sides of our 25-page sheaf of bank statements in only 22.5 seconds for a near 67ppm average.

Moving up to 300dpi, we timed our scan test at 33 seconds for an equally impressive average of 45.5ppm. Only at 600dpi did it shows signs of stress with scan speeds dropping to a pedestrian 6ppm.

It's a winner for output quality too; 200dpi scans for both greyscale and colour are detailed enough for document archiving systems, OCR performance is great and we could easily find specific payees in the searchable PDFs of our bank statements.

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The scanner's raked paper input tray offers a slightly flatter path than most other upright desktop scanners resulting in perfect paper handling. The 6440 took all our small receipts, tissue-thin courier waybills and customer registration forms in its stride without any jams occurring and it had no problems scanning small stacks of embossed credit cards.

The input tray has a latch that quickly sets the paper guides for A4 or Letter sized documents and flipping them down allows the scanner to handle dot-matrix paper and documents up to 3 metres long. Other nice touches on the output tray are a drop-down paper catcher at the front and an adjustable flip-up stop in the middle for smaller documents.

The price includes a generous software bundle that'll cover most business document management needs. Along with the OneTouch utility, you get Nuance's PaperPort Professional v14 for solid document and image management, OmniPage Ultimate v19.1 and its OCR tools plus Power PDF for creating PDFs from other file formats.

OneTouch links the scanner's function button to nine different actions. The panel's LED display only shows a number so you'll need to keep a list handy so users know what each one does.

Actions include scans to an application, local and network folders, printer, email, fax, FTP server or SharePoint server while output formats include BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PDF and searchable PDF. To create an action, you choose a function number from OneTouch, pick a destination, add an output format and assign a configuration.

OneTouch suits any scanning occasion with configuration options for a resolution plus colour, greyscale or mono output, while specific tabs are added for the selected destination. To add cloud support to OneTouch, we used the Visioneer Connect web form to request plug-ins for Box, Evernote, Dropbox, filesanywhere, and Google Docs.

It's easy to scan multiple, separate documents to a single file by setting the manual feed timeout in seconds which causes OneTouch to wait while you insert the next page. The integral OneTouch Acuity feature provides anti-skew, auto-crop, page rotation plus blank page skipping and a handy option to redact selected areas of an image with coloured blocks during the scan.

The DocuMate 6440 may not have network support but Xerox's versatile OneTouch software goes a long way to make up for this as it provides simple, one-touch scanning manoeuvres to a wide range of destinations. Add in its fast scan speeds and classy output quality and you have an ideal choice for high-demand environments.

This review originally appeared in PC Pro issue 278

Verdict

600dpi A4 colour ADF scanner

60ppm @ 200dpi colour/mono

Simplex/duplex

80-page ADF

USB 2

Max. daily duty cycle – 6,000 pages

External PSU

Visioneer OneTouch and Acuity, Nuance PaperPort Pro 14, OmniPage Ultimate 19.1, Power PDF software

TWAIN/ISIS/WIA drivers

316 x 168 x 191mm (WDH - closed)

4.2kgs

1yr standard advanced exchange warranty

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.