Are pure scanners headed for extinction?

In the past scanners were pure as the drive snow.  The required lots of tweaking and many of us spent hours adjusting the contrast and brightness on a Copiscan II manually, one page at a time.  But no matter how difficult they did only one thing they scanned paper and they were the only machines that did.   I remember that huge hunk of metal that Kodak put out in the early days that cost over $100,000 and could scan to image and to microfilm.  You just could not get better than that.   Then we started to see scanners divided into big, middle and small (which some of us affectionately called toasters).

New software came along which gave us better tools to adjust the image along with blank page detection.  I still am amazed at the technology that auto rotates the page to make it right side up.  OCR and auto keywords helped us to ease the strain of manually indexing.  Cornerstone monitors which cost $2,000 were eventually replaced with $250 Flat Screen monitors, sometimes with dual monitors.  And technology kept changing our workplace.

 

While we were all focused on imaging the copier companies were changing too.  The big honking desk sized $7,000 copiers started to morph into multi function devices.  They became copiers, printers, faxes and even scanners.  Most of us did not notice that the multifunction device was coming in the back door.  In my company scanners were considered technology and you could not purchase one with out justifying it.  While Technology Services was controlling pure scanners the multifunction devices were being purchased by our Corporate Services without any more justification than replacing an old copier.

 

We have to now leverage the imaging asset previously considered as the stepchild of the multi function device.   I see the copier companies almost abandoning the traditional copier except for large volume versions and I see the scanner companies threatened with the same scenario.  Will the scanner companies have to drop the toasters and middle sized scanners?  I don’t know but it looks like there is going to be a really big confrontation brewing.   

 

Rich Payne

What do you think?

Comments

[Bob H]

You are probably right in the long run but I'm not sure the middle sized scanners are exactly headed for their demise just yet. There is still that area between a company having fully centralized scanning and the small multi-function unit scanning done for a few sheets at a time. I'm writing this because this is what my company is doing now with department centralized scanning. We still require a balance between higher volume scanning and document control that we haven't automated so it requires a person to be familiar with specific documents.

[John Turner]

Multifunction devices, even with add on software, aren't yet capable of even moderate efficiency of a mid-size scanner. I agree with previous post about the small scanners as well. There is room for a mix to address differing needs.

[Rich Payne]

Thanks for your comments; volume will affect the need for a mid-size scanner. It would seem to me that the major benefit of the Multifunction devices is that they don’t need an additional PC and that they can be controlled centrally. What do you think?