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.
© 1996 Matt Lake. All rights reserved.
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
