Space for Paper-1996-11-19-Paperport and Syquest-Matt Lake

In a small office, space is the final frontier. There's never enough room to store all your incoming information, especially since most of it is on paper. To compound the problem, the typical computer-based solution (a scanner with document management software) takes up even more valuable desk and hard disk space.

However, two apparently unrelated products can give you a veritable desktop warehouse. Visioneer's PaperPort ix is the smallest document scanner in the cosmos; it's built into a standard size keyboard. And SyQuest's EZFlyer 230 is an external hard drive that uses removable 230MB cartridges. Are you beginning to get the picture?

If you shop carefully, you can get this duo for less than $650 and throw out a filing cabinet or two. But can you replace your whole filing system with this setup?

HOW BIG IS YOUR FILING CABINET?

Visioneer's PaperPort scanner/keyboard is the most unassuming scanner you've ever seen, packed into the heaviest keyboard you've ever wielded. (At five pounds, it's heavier than some laptop computers.) The one thick cable leading out of the back is long enough to reach a system buried under your desk. It splits into a regular keyboard plug and a serial adapter, though if you have a serial-to-parallel converter, the scanner can work with a parallel port. (One downside: To draw enough juice to run the scanner, you must plug in a fat AC adapter that covers three outlets on a power strip, which is annoying.)

Once installed, the 104-key Windows 95 keyboard is sturdy and has a snappy action. The built-in, black-and-white scanner is much better than we've come to expect from Visioneer. It's not up to desktop publishing standards by any stretch, but it scans up to 400dpi with eight bits of grayscale information. The resulting scans make anything, from articles ripped from newspapers to family snapshots, look good.

SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS

The software that runs PaperPort is so huge Visioneer ships it on a CD-ROM. In addition to a handy introduction to using the unit, you get the necessary drivers to run the thing under Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 and a fistful of handy tools.

The PaperPort filing cabinet software works like a combined drag-and-drop file viewer and file manager. Slip a sheet of paper into the scanner, and PaperPort scans the file and drops a thumbnail image onto the PaperPort desktop. You can then view the image full screen, drag it to a file folder, or drag it to various icons at the bottom of the screen. For example, drag the image to the copier icon to adjust the brightness and contrast to perfection before printing a sheet. Drag it to the fax or email icons (linked to existing fax and email programs PaperPort finds on your system), and the document is electronically transmitted as soon as you address it. Drag the image to an installed application like Microsoft Word, and PaperPort's OCR program kicks in. It turns the image into machine-readable text and drops it into Word, ready for you to, um, correct.

OCR ... ONLY CARICATURES RECOGNIZED?

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a flawed technology at best. The "lite" version of Xerox TextBridge included with the PaperPort ix is more flawed than it should be, especially when it comes to recognizing words on newsprint in multiple columns. When I tried it, it worked on clearly printed text on thick, letterhead stock, but it badly flubbed several newspaper and magazine articles. For a starter application, it's acceptable, but before long, you'll be craving a full-strength OCR program�and you'll be out of pocket another couple of hundred bucks. (Note: The full-blown version of TextBridge is easy to set up for the PaperPort; other OCR packages will require some fiddling.)

Corex CardScan, a business card scanning and management package, suffered the same checkered character recognition as TextBridge SE. But it had a bigger drawback: The scanner had trouble handling heavier card stock. Cards often got stuck and required a push, resulting in unusable scans. And the OLE link between PaperPort and CardScan kept flaking out. After scanning 20 cards in a batch, I had to feed the rest of the cards through five at a time to prevent error messages. If you end up using the PaperPort a lot, you'll want to export the business card scans to something more capable and ditch this turkey.

SYQUEST FOR THE GRAIL

Since CardScan and PaperPort both save scans as big, fat TIFF files, you'll notice a big, fat dent in your hard disk pretty soon. That's where SyQuest EZFlyer 230 comes in. About the size of your average John Grisham novel, it's like a hard disk drive but with a few significant differences. The drive plugs into your parallel port (or SCSI card, if you have one) using the provided cable. The hard disks themselves are encased in cartridges that you can pop out at will, so you can expand your storage infinitely�within the limits of your budget.

The EZFlyer drive is pretty easy to install, although the setup routines don't behave exactly as the manual describes. Once up and running, the unit has its own drive letter, so you use whatever file manager you're comfortable with. And compared to some removable disk drives, the SyQuest is pretty fast.

If storage space is low, the EZFlyer makes a lot of sense. Cartridges cost about $30 a pop, which translates into about $.13 a megabyte thereafter. (By comparison, disks for Iomega's Zip drive can cost $.16 a megabyte.) Iomega's media may be more durable, but SyQuest's Winchester cartridges are cheaper at the moment.

EZFLYER AND PAPERPORT: THE DREAM TEAM?

Neither product is perfect, but they're both a viable, affordable way to create a disk-based document filing system and clear some deskspace. Since this is an ersatz solution, they aren't integrated. But they do the job and mostly live up to their promises. That's good enough for this small office adventurer.

Where to Buy:

EZFlyer 230MB
SyQuest Technology
800/245-2278
www.syquest.com
List price: $299; additional 230MB cartridges, $29.95 each

PaperPort ix
Visioneer
415/812-6400
www.visioneer.com
List price: $349; serial-to-parallel adapter, $8

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DVD titling; and digital audio, Adobe Photoshop CS3 extended, Adobe illustrator CS3,Adobe indesign CS3,Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional, Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, Adobe Dreamweaver CS3,Adobe Contribute CS3,Adobe Fireworks CS3,Adobe After Effects CS3 Professional, Adobe Premiere Pro CS3,Adobe Soundbooth CS3,Adobe Encore CS3,Adobe OnLocation,Adobe Bridge CS3,Adobe Version Cue CS3,Adobe Device Central CS3,Adobe Stock Photos, Intel Pentium 4 (1.4GHz processor for DV; 3.4GHz processor for HDV), Intel Centrino, Intel Xeon, (dual 2.8GHz processors for HD), or Intel Core, Duo (or compatible) processor; SSE2-enabled processor required for AMD systems Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise (certified for 32-bit editions) 1GB of RAM for DV; 2GB of RAM for HDV and HD; more RAM recommended when running multiple components 10GB of available hard-disk space (additional free space required during installation) Dedicated 7,200 RPM hard drive for DV and HDV editing; striped disk array storage (RAID 0) for HD; SCSI disk subsystem preferred Microsoft DirectX compatible sound card (multichannel ASIO-compatible sound card recommended),1,280x1,024 monitor resolution with 32-bit color adapter Blu-ray burner required for Blu-ray Disc creation OHCI compatible IEEE 1394 port for DV and HDV capture, export to tape, and transmit to DV device QuickTime 7.1.2 software required to use QuickTime features Broadband Internet connection required for Adobe Stock Photos* and other services

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