I’m always amazed at how weak the market for scanners is. The devices aren’t always that good, and the software that accompanies them is generally speaking pretty awful. Those that were once good, like PaperMaster, are now dead.
So it’s good to hear that NeatReceipts, once interested mainly in, well, scanning receipts, is now called The Neat Company, and is about to launch NeatDesk – “the all-new desktop scanner and digital filing system.” It’s got what looks like a pretty cool Automatic Document Feeder scanner that will take receipts, business cards and documents—in the same scan.
I used NeatReceipts and thought it was a good effort—it did a good job of trying to parse receipts, although the user interface was overly complex and the software not particularly stable. Neat Co says the software has been completely overhauled.
The device is going to sell for $400+ once it’s launched. More anon.
The Neat Company – Preorder Sale
Update: Evernote have added PDF preview for Windows. Is there room anymore for Paperport and its ilk? This is a great addition to Evernote and something I think really pushes it into the ‘capture all your cr*p’ category. Good on them.
One word: ScanSnap (by Fujitsu). I’ve owned three of these scanners, used them on PC and Mac, and they’re generally great. The newest ones OCR your documents immediately after you scan them in, and they’re better than they used to be at handling odd paper sizes as well. The scanner is double-sided and scans to PDF (or JPEG or TIFF). The downside is that there’s no TWAIN interface for other software, but if you’re satisfied with a paper-to-PDF solution for archiving paper then this works. Occasional niggles with multiple page feeds, but cleaning the paper path fixes this.
James, thanks for this, and I agree ScanSnaps are great. Weak point is the lack of a decent program to organize the PDFs once they’re aboard. It’ll be interesting to see whether the NeatDesk tackles that.