Visioneer StrobePro Sheetfed Scanner

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.