Xerox DocuMate 5540 review

Businesses with irregular digitising demands will love Xerox's new DocuMate 5540, which combines a 40ppm ADF with a traditional A4 flatbed for scanning books, magazines and so forth.

It's a well built unit, although the paper supports for the 70-page ADF are a little flimsy. Note too that it lacks network capabilities, connecting to a host system over USB 2.

Getting set up on Windows 8.1 took less than 20 minutes, and installed a generous software bundle, including Nuance's PaperPort for document management and OmniPage OCR.

In addition, you get the Visioneer OneTouch utility, which lets you link the scanner's function button to nine different actions: these include scanning to applications, local or network folders, printers, email, fax, FTP servers and SharePoint servers.

File format choices only extend to BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PDF and searchable PDF, however, and the panel's LED display only shows a number; you'll want to print a list so users know what each programme does.

For cloud scanning, you can use the Visioneer Connect web form to request add-ons for Box, Evernote, Dropbox, FilesAnywhere and Google Drive.

Setting up Google Drive presented no problems; to use Evernote, we simply downloaded the latest plugin. There's no Dropbox plugin, but it was easy to create a scan-to-storage profile for our sync folder.

Once we'd sorted out our actions, scanning was a simple process, and the 5540 is quiet, too. We loaded our documents, chose an action number and watched OneTouch pop up and start the scan process.

The control panel has a simplex and duplex overrride button; to scan from the flatbed rather than the ADF, simply make sure the ADF is empty when you press the scan button.

ADF scan speeds are resolution- dependent, and there's an eight- second delay between pressing the start button and the scan starting. At 200dpi, our 30-page wad of bank statements completed at 43ppm for a colour duplex scan to PDF; at 300dpi it dropped to 33ppm.

PaperPort processes your scans on a page-by- page basis, and pauses the scanner when it needs to catch up, so this can slow things down too: at 600dpi we saw speeds tumble to only 6ppm.

The flatbed produced good scans in decent time: a colour magazine cover was scanned to a JPEG in nine seconds at 300dpi, and 14 seconds at 600dpi. Quality is very good: colour images were packed with detail, and text scanned at 200dpi was perfectly clean enough for archival. The OneTouch Acuity feature offers deskewing and blank-page skipping, and you can redact scans with blocks of colour.

The ADF performed well in our mixed document test too. Our pile of till receipts did cause a jam, but the scanner stopped before any were damaged. Credit cards and ID posed no problems, although each one hadto be fed in separately.

Along with a strong software bundle, the DocuMate 5540 offers fast speeds and high-quality scans at a fair price. The lack of networking means it won't be ideal for every business, but with both a fast ADF and a flatbed, Xerox has every scanning angle covered.

This review first appeared in PC Pro magazine issue 252

Verdict

Along with a strong software bundle, the DocuMate 5540 offers fast speeds and high-quality scans at a fair price. The lack of networking means it won’t be ideal for every business, but with both a fast ADF and a flatbed, Xerox has every scanning angle covered.

600dpi colour optical resolution

ADF/ flatbed

40ppm at 300dpi mono/colour

Simplex/duplex

70-pageADF

USB2

External PSU

Daily duty cycle, 5,000 pages

Visioneer OneTouch and Acuity, Nuance PaperPort Pro 14, OmniPage Professional 18, PDF Converter 7.3 software

TWAIN/ISIS/ WIA drivers

319 x 587 x 269 (closed, WDH)

1yr standard advanced exchange warranty