The Xerox DocuMate 3120 ($379) is a document scanner that provides decent performance at a budget price. It may not blow the competition away, but it doesn't leave much to complain about, either. The DocuMate 3120 is a good choice as cost-effective personal scanner, or for low-volume scanning in a home office, a sole proprietorship, or a tiny business with a need to archive documents.

Design

At 10.3 by 11.2 by 10.3 inches (HWD) with the trays fully extended, it should be easy enough to find a place for this scanner. The Documate 3120 has a straight-through paper path, so it can scan plastic cards, as well as paper documents. It can scan letter- or legal-size documents, and banners up to 8.5 by 38 inches. The automatic document feeder (ADF) can hold up to 50 sheets of paper.

The front-panel buttons include On-Off, Simplex, and Duplex, plus up and down arrow buttons for switching between scanning profiles, which are numbered 1 to 9. The current profile number is displayed on the scanner's single-character LCD.

Settings and Software
The scanner has nine preset, customizable OneTouch profiles. Default scan profiles are Scan, PDF, Print, Email, Fax: OCR, Archive, Photo, and Magazine, with appropriate file types and destinations for each. The Visioneer OneTouch utility, accessible by clicking on an icon on your taskbar, displays the nine preset scan destinations. In addition to initiating scans from the scanner or your computer using OneTouch, you can also scan from included programs (Nuance OmniPage Pro, and Nuance PaperPort), as well as almost any program that has a scan command by virtue of the included Twain, Isis, and WIA drivers.

Bundled software includes the Visioneer OneTouch scan utility, Nuance PaperPort for document management, Nuance OmniPage Pro for optical character recognition (OCR), Nuance PDF Converter Pro, Visioneer Acuity for image enhancement, and the aforementioned drivers for scanning from within applications.

Speed
The DocuMate 3120 has a rated speed of 20 pages per minute (ppm) for simplex (one-sided) scanning and 20ppm/40ipm (images per minute, where each side of a page counts as one image) for duplex scanning. These speeds are for 200 or 300 dpi, black-and-white, gray-scale, or color. For 300dpi, black-and-white to image PDF scans, I timed it at 19.5ppm for simplex scanning and 13.9 ppm/28.8ipm for duplex scanning, so it effectively matched its rated speed for simplex scanning, but lagged a bit in scanning the same number of pages in duplex.

When I switched to searchable PDF, which for most businesses is the preferred form for archiving documents, it averaged 2 minutes 42 seconds in scanning the same 25-page, 50-image document. This is nearly a minute longer than its time to scan to image PDF (1:48). That's a respectable time, but well off the pace of scanners such as the Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula DR-C125, rated at 25ppm/50ipm, which lost no time in the OCR phase, scanning to both image and searchable PDF formats in a minute flat. The Editors' Choice Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 also rated at 25ppm, took 1 minute 5 seconds to scan to searchable PDF, just 4 seconds longer than its image PDF scanning time.

OCR Testing
I scanned to OCR (rich-text format) using the OneTouch OCR setting. The Documate 3120 did well, scanning both our Times New Roman and Arial test pages down to 8 points without error. It had mixed results in some of the less-common fonts, doing better than usual with one, but worse than usual with two.

The 3120 can scan paper or plastic cards, but it does not include a business card management program, which we would normally test.

There's no business card software, but otherwise the DocuMate 3120 has a good bundled suite. Its OCR performance in accurately scanning text to Word format is good. The 3120 effectively met its rated speed for simplex scanning in our tests, but slowed down when scanning two-sided documents. Its speed in scanning to searchable PDF is in the middle of the pack, well off the top tier. It was slower than the Editors' Choice Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 in scanning two-sided documents, and especially in scanning to searchable PDF.

The Xerox DocuMate 3120 is a solid performer that's available at a modest price. It does little to make it stand out from the pack, but it doesn't embarrass itself, either. It's a good choice for a budget document scanner for an individual or a tiny office, provided that they don't need to scan business cards.