Xerox DocuMate 3120 Duplex Color Scanner for PC and Mac

I needed a document-feed scanner to make a permanent copy of all my writing pre-dating computers. Piles of hand-written and type-written stories, and old carbon copies. This scanner is so perfect for my needs! I'm running the scanner with a USB cord off my Windows 7 laptop. It's lightweight and about the size of my toaster--even a bit smaller. It opens to reveal a tray for loading a stack of documents. I have found 20 pages works well. It'll take one sheet at a time or as many as 50. I scanned a 100 page document in about 5 stacks in less than 10 minutes! The pages show up on my laptop screen similar to the way photos and other images show up. If you scan a stack of pages, they can be saved as that stack, or you can add to them, delete from them, and rearrange them. I drag and drop the files to folders created for organizing these many years of documents. I can scan them as black and white documents which removes the yellow cast of the brittle old paper. Or I have scanned color documents, as in drawings.UPDATE 1/31/16 All I can say is this is the best thing I've bought in a long time! The scanner loves 3x5 cards. I can scan one side only, or both sides at the same time. The machine never overheats. It has a slightly different speed for one-sided scanning is all. It HATES staples, so if you miss a page stapled to another, the scanner will eat them all and punish you but jams are easy to fix.I have emptied a 3" binder completely full of paper in less than an hour. Except for extremely pale originals, the quality of the saved scan is very adequate for my needs. Naming, combining, and routing files to folders is drag and drop.Great machine!It will scan small pieces of paper. There's a guide that moves in and out to hug the outer edge of the paper. This helps the paper feed straight. I'm looking forward to exploring how it handles 3x5 cards.I haven't yet learned if it can translate to a word document. I don't expect to find anything I might need to edit as an actual text document, but the description of this product said it had the capability. My purpose was to get a bookcase of paper into my computer as files I can organize and read as time allows, and then burn to CD on the off chance somebody in the family might like to read what I wrote way back when. And then I'll have an empty bookcase available for whatever.The price of this was fantastic for my needs. It's small enough to fit on a desk or shelf. It's quiet, fast and so far no problems. My first scans were using the scanner buttons, but since then it seems to want the commands to come from the computer. The screens are very easy to use.I learned the hard way not to scan a document with "stickers" on it--I had documents with reinforced 3-ring binder holes. Those little things caused the stack to snag and misfeed. So I just scanned that document one page at a time, no problem.If I had the time I imagine I could scan a 3" binder filled to capacity with paper in the space of an hour. I do think I made the scanner overheat slightly when I scanned that 100 page document one batch after another, but like the big copy machines at work, it just needed a few seconds to cool off.So far I'm delighted.UPDATE 2018....still my favorite machine of all time. Just spent 2 hours scanning 915 photographs.

After struggling to make this work for quite awhile, I ended up throwing it in the garbage and replacing. At first it worked fine and I was happy with it. Then it started jamming so I sometimes had to feed paper to it one at at time. Then there was the upgrade to windows 7. But the software to operate it, Paperport was not upgraded. So I had to operate this with my older windows 7 computer. One last time, the scanner jammed. Then Paperport wouldn't recognize the attached scanner. I fixed that. Then it jammed again on a single sheet of paper. That was it. I am done.

Absolutely awesome. I'm going paperless, I know it says 600 dpi but somehow I'm able to get 1200dpi. Maybe its drivers? Idk anyway it came with some pretty good software, but I opted for abbyreader which has the best optical recognition ever. I just love it! Scan the stuff in, align and read characters automatically, convert over to a pdf and get all the menus on the left column.... this process is almost entirely automatic and didn't take long for me to scan in about 500 pages.I'll just list pros and cons and you can read more below.Pros-High imaging quality, came with great AAA production quality drivers (licensed), feeds plenty fast for a home office, doesn't jam once you know how it works inside, great OCRCons- OCR won't catch everything unless you max the quality. I suspect it is a bear on the system at high settings, I run 32gbs ddr4 ram into a 4core 3.7ghz, radeon 7990 (6gb VRAM). I've managed to crash the scanner by loading too many papers in continuously, so let it do your paper in sets to prevent it. With my system I still have to wait a considerable time for OCR and the transfer between scanner and computer. It's not bad for me, maybe depends on the scanner's connection or capabilities, still I wouldn't try using a weak system with this until you do your research.Don't expect the optical recognition to catch everything unless you are running it at 1200dpi, but when I did seems like it didn't miss a single letter. LOVE IT!!! Funny this was the cheapest decently rated duplex scanner I found, was also the highest rated but I felt like it was a gamble because there weren't very many ratings. We are the lucky few who will get to experience this awesome and affordable printer (I should've been in advertising haha). Reccomend buying it, when you use it dont push the paper into it or it will jam (sounds obvious but its not) and don't put too much paper in at once. I almost had to replace the little aluminum thing after the first day. Just chill load like 40 pages at a time (80 duplex) and you should be fine.

This scanner's good looking hardware is marred by poor software. The scanner looks beautiful and has a simple interface. The output tray flaps open and eventually broke off at the hinge, but despite that, it's a solid scanner. The problem is that every week or so, the scanner disappears from the computer! We have to unplug both the power and USB, wait a minute, and plug them back in to make it show up again in Windows -- and that's if we're lucky! Sometimes even that won't work and I have to spend an hour uninstalling and reinstalling the software. Not worth the hassle.