Ever wonder how to digitize all those old family letters? Documate!

Author's Rating:

Pros: High resolution, fast. But has some serious problems have not been able to solve.

Cons: Won't scan ultrathin onionskin, clips the trailing 1 mm off items.

The Bottom Line: 
There is no other machine like it for speed, resolution, quality, reliability; you have no choice in the matter, buy this without hesitation.

Author's Review
The Xerox Documate 252 is not a perfect machine, but it's almost. [See last update, have grown frustrated with Documate 252 and would not recommend it to anyone] It has revolutionized my family history documentation overnight. I have thousands of documents to scan, way more than anyone in their right mind could do with a flatbed scanner. In the ten days since this machine arrived I have gone thru about 10 thick binders full. The documents include letters, cards, on all imagineable sizes and kinds of paper. It does a great job. I only have three problems: 1. It will not scan the very thinnest paper, a kind of ultrathin onionskin. Just won't do it. 2. It will abort scans in which paper is severely folded in the middle. Probably could iron the sheets to overcome this. 3. It clips about 1 to 1.5 mm off the trailing edge of documents in duplex, i.e. double-sided scans. This is only a problem because my father used almost every available surface area on 3 x 5 cards in August and Sept. of 1951 on a trip to post-war Europe. I worked around it by having the trailing edge coincide with his widest margins, so it's not a big problem. It took me a while to get a good workflow going, mostly choosing the right dpi to scan with, which was 300-400, depending on sheet size. Also, I decided to dump tif files, which are enormous, and not worth keeping when you scan at 400 dpi, and convert them to pdf files. I would have had 2 terabytes without dumping the tifs otherwise.

I am not that impressed with the PaperPort software that comes with the Documate, though I have learned to live with it. It is pretty slow and cumbersome to edit the pdfs, so I quit, and bought a copy of Adobe Acrobat 7.0, and will used that instead. I am sure I have a lot to learn about this wonderful machine, and do not want to be unfairly critical of elements that I don't understand, but c'est la vie. I should also say it took me about 5 hours to get it up and running, since it did not like the usb port I had it connected to. When I changed ports it worked perfectly and instantly.

UPDATE a month later: After several thousand pages I started getting dozens of fine colored lines on scans and determined they were caused by dust on a glass plate in the ccd pathway. It's impossible to reach the dust to clean it. Xerox techsupport was very understanding, and wanted only to see a scan, then okayed a replacement.

Update five months later: I have finally gotten around to using the replacement Documate 252. This machine does not scan the trailing edge of documents, ca. 8 mm wide. This is a big problem for postal cards on which people have written there. Also, still having problems with colored lines from tiny bits of dust as before.

All in all, considering the high price of the item, I am much less enthusiastic about it now, and would no longer recommend anyone buy it. Surely there are better machines out there without these significant problems.