The Xerox DocuMate 4830 ($2,495 direct) isn't just more expensive than most desktop document scanners. It's different too. First, it offers both an automatic document feeder (ADF) and a flatbed, so you can scan bound pages and originals you don't want to risk damaging. And second, both the flatbed and ADF are big enough to handle cut sheets up to U.S. tabloid size (11 by 17 inches) or ISO A3 size (11.69 by 16.54 inches). Not everyone needs to scan at these large sizes. But for those who do, the combination of the large format, a flatbed, and an ADF make the 4830 well worth the price.

You can find less expensive large-format scanners, although there aren't a lot of them. The Plustek OpticPro A320 ($599 street, 3 stars) comes to mind, for example. However, the Plustek A320 doesn't have an ADF, and for most document scanning, an ADF is a must-have convenience that can easily pay for itself in time saved. Beyond that, the ADFs on some scanners, including the 4830, will let you scan far larger sheets of paper than can fit on the flatbed.

The maximum paper size for the 4830 is 11.69 by 118 inches. (At least, that's what the spec sheet says. I didn’t have any paper that long to test with.) However, it's also worth noting that the flatbed cheats a little on size by being not quite big enough for a full tabloid-size sheet (or ledger-size sheet, which is the same size in landscape orientation). I measured the platen at 12 inches by just a little short of 17 inches, which means you can't quite scan a tabloid-size page edge to edge. This shouldn't be a problem with documents, however, since virtually any document will have at least a small margin.

Setup and Scanning

Aside from needing more than the usual amount of flat space for the 7.6 by 22.9 by 19.6 inch 4830, setup is standard fare. Put the scanner in place, unlock it, connect a USB cable, and run the installation program.

In addition to a scan utility, the 4830 comes with two application programs: Nuance OmniPage Professional 17 for optical character recognition (OCR) and Nuance PDF Converter Professional 7 for managing PDF files. Both are excellent programs and are good choices for document scanning needs. However, the installation program also installs Twain, ISIS, and WIA drivers, which will let you scan directly from almost any Windows program that includes a scan command.

For most of my tests, I used the scan utility, which lets you define up to nine scan profiles, with settings for resolution, paper size, color mode, the format to save the file in, and more. You can also easily redefine the presets as needed, as well as store alternatives to the current settings for easy retrieval. Also very much worth mention is Visioneer's Acuity digital enhancement module, which is built into the utility, and lets you control settings like whether to straighten the image, automatically rotate pages to the right orientation, or drop out a given color to make the image more readable.

As with too many other scanners, the only way to pick a scan preset from the scanner's front panel is by number. However, the utility's pop-up screen on the computer shows enough information to make it easy to pick the right preset from the computer screen without having to memorize which number does what.

Performance

The official speed rating for the 4830 is 30 pages per minute (ppm) for simplex (scanning one side) and 60 images per minute (ipm) for duplex (scanning both sides) at 200 pixels per inch (ppi) and black and white scan mode. In my tests using letter-size paper and scanning to image PDF format, however, I measured it at 25.0 ppm in simplex and 51.7 ipm in duplex. As with the Editors' Choice Kodak i2600, which is rated at 100 ipm but came in at 76.9 ipm on our tests, that's a little short of the claimed speed, but within a reasonable range of the claim.

Because the text in the PDF image files looked a little ragged at 200 ppi, I also tried scanning at 300 ppi. As expected, the image quality improved considerably, with much more easily readable text. Even better, with simplex scans, the speed at 300 ppi was essentially the same as at 200 ppi. With duplex scans, however, the speed dropped considerably, to just 26.1 ipm. More precisely, the scan itself took about the same amount of time, but it took far longer to transfer the larger amount of data to the computer, which slowed down the total time for the scan.

Scanning to searchable PDF format, which is generally the more useful choice for document management applications, took relatively little extra time for the text recognition step. Using a 25-page document, I timed the scanner at 1 minute 44 seconds at 200 ppi and at 2:34 at 300 ppi. Scanning a single ledger-size page to searchable PDF format took 16 seconds for simplex mode and 19 seconds for duplex mode.

Text Recognition and Other Issues

The scanner turned in a high score for OCR accuracy, reading both our Times New Roman and Arial test pages at sizes as small as 6 points without a mistake. It also did notably well with an assortment of other fonts that we don't usually report the performance for, because it's a given that few scanners can read them well. Most impressively, with two highly stylized fonts that most scanners fail to read without mistakes at any font size, the 4830 managed to read our test pages at sizes as small as 8 points without a mistake.

Unfortunately, I also ran into some issues that make the scanner a little less attractive than it could be. To begin with, the predefined settings in the scan utility don't include any for tabloid, ledger, or A3 paper sizes. The largest is for legal size. Another oversight is that some of the default definitions in the utility seemed designed for other scanners. In one case, the front and back of pages came out upside down relative to each other until I dug into the settings and set the utility to automatically rotate pages.

The good news is that these issues are more annoyances than serious problems. Once you get past them, by creating new scan definitions or modifying the default settings to match your needs, the scanner can do its job reasonably well.

Also worth mention is that for the setting issues I ran into there are at least two known fixes that Xerox is considering at this writing. The company says it should have decided on one and put it in place by the time you read this. Even without the fix, however, if you need to scan at tabloid or A3 size, and you need to scan multipage, duplex documents, the Xerox DocuMate 4830 is a more than reasonable choice and well worth a close look.

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