Good scanners

[onedsla]

I'm after a couple of scanners for a department at work to transfer a room full of A4 docs to electronic form.

We've previously bought £350ish Epsom SCSI scanners which are a bit too slow for this purpose.

Could anybody recommend the fastest scanner possible for around the £500 mark? Would USB2 be a good option?
thanks

[simpo two]

This may sound daft but - depending on the resolution you need - have you thought of using a digital camera?

I wanted to scan some record sleeves but they were too big for the A4 scanner. I photographed them instead and it was quick and simple.

[stevieb]

I can source Document Photo Things for around £1800 but thats a bit over budget.

There are automatic Feeding Scanners for around £500 that can do 250 documents at a time. I will have a look and see what i can find

Steve

[agent006]

Try Fujitsu, they do a very nice duplex audo feeding one. USB and scsi all in one (but not at the same time).

[arcturus]

I know it's over budget but have a look at the Epson GT15000. It's an A3 scanner with a document feeder option. Will scan 10 pages /min in colour and 16 pages/min in b&w. It comes with both SCSI and USB2 interfaces and is also networkable. £699 without the feeder.

[onedsla]

Has anybody got any thoughts on USB2 v SCSI? I'd have thought that the USB interface has a greater throughput (perhaps as much as the HDD of an old P3 Dell will take) and would be better in bursts, but the SCSI better with sustained info?

A further consideration is that the PC is currently running NT (hence existing SCSI card) and there'd be a cost implication on upgrading it to XP (in fact I'd probably need to replace the PC too)