Xerox DocuMate 4700

Being in the antique ephemera business I need a scanner that reproduced color flawlessly. Sadly this scanner is not designed for that task. It is, however, an excellent scanner for large-sized documents and books. It is surprisingly lightweight, scans quickly, and sets up with ease.Potential customers should know that the DocuMate 4700 gives some vintage paper a pink hue. The hue is also visible in staple holes and rough edges. This cannot be adequately color corrected. Several calls to tech support were answered quickly by very patient staff who remoted into my computer and adjusted input and output levels for (in total) probably four hours. Ultimately the scanner was thought defective and a replacement was sent, but it was of no avail, the problem persisted with the new unit.After more than a year of trying to get this scanner to work for my purposes, Xerox stood by their product and allowed me to return it for a full refund. And for that extraordinary satisfaction guarantee, they get 5 stars.All-day long.

At my school we use large ESPON scanners and the quality is amazing so I had very high expectations. But they cost $3,000 to $4,000 dollars so seeing this one at $584 dollars had me skeptical. After trying it out, I was very impressed.Pros-cheap-durable-large. It has a total scanning area of 12" x 18" but the edges get cut off and blurred when you scan so the actual scanning area is 11"x17"-scan 24-bit color, grayscale, and some strange mode called black and white which heavily distorts whatever youre scanning so I never use it.-scans 200dpi 300dpi 600dpi and when you register it, you get access to 1200 dpi (although I havent noticed a difference between 1200 and 600 dpi)-you can do a quick preview and then use the selection tool to select a smaller area to scan instead of scanning the whole thing-you can edit the brightness in preview mode. I find the default brightness to be perfect.-you can convert your scanned documents into a word searchable PDF-you can remove the top to scan even larger documents and then stitch them together in another program like photoshopCons-when you hit 'preview' the button immediately changes to a 'cancel' button. Sometimes my mouse double clicks so it presses preview and then clicks again canceling the preview. It doesnt happen all the time but when it does it can be very annoying-you can only make 1 selection in the preview. On the ESPON scanners you can make multiple selections in the preview producing multiple images in one scan. For instance, when scanning photos, I can lay them out on the scanning bed and then create a selection for each photo and knock out like 8 photos with one scan. With this scanner, I have to do them one at a time. I could be saving myself a lot of time.-the software came in a CD. My computer does not have a CD tray so I had to go to someone elses computer , move the software onto a hard drive and then bring it onto my PC. It installed fine but it appears CDs are becoming outdated.The quality you get with ESPON is still better. I have attached photos showing the difference. You can see how the documate scan is smudged and blurry despite both being scanned at 600dpi. But with documate being 84% cheaper than the espon, such little improvement is not worth forking the money for IMO. If youre a professional artist, then maybe go with espon. You get more post-processing features in ESPON like hue saturation contrast while this program only has brightness. The colors on this scanner are great. I have happily scanned over 3,300 family photos with this. And of course its great for scanning regular documents.

This scanner was decent right up until it failed to scan at around the 8 month mark with light usage."Hardware failed to initiate." No combination of new USB cables, new power cables, or rebooting has resolved this issue. There doesn't appear to be a way to reset the firmware. The error code is neither in the manual nor in the online knowledge base. It powers up fine, moves during the initial power up, and then sits there. It's a $500 brick.

I have used several scanners over the years and in the early days, they were built like tanks and generally worked very well. Then, the usual cheapening occurred so they could all out do each other on price. The market is dominated by these cheap (generally around $100 or less) scanners and for the most part, they are junk. This scanner, however, is a throwback to the days when things were well built. It's heavy duty and has a large scanning area. I was looking for a large scanning area so I could scan old piano music in, that music was always published on very large sheets which didn't fit the letter/legal size scanners. Large bed scanners are few and far between and more expensive that they cheapos... However, in this case, it's an improvement in overall quality too. You can tell just listening to it when it scans, sounds like a very smooth running machine running on quality bearing surfaces.I was very hesitant to buy this one because of the price, but did anyway and I am very happy with the product itself. If you have need for a large scanning area scanner and like well built tools, this is a good choice.Oh, by the way, it takes up a lot more table space than the old letter/legal size one did -- but, hey, that's to be expected.

I've been using this scanner to scan old scrapbooks and photo albums. I needed something that could scan 12x12" pages without having to remove photos and other mementos. This does the trick and the image quality is fine for what I'm doing, but the software is less than ideal. Each scan stores the image in a separate folder, rather than as separate images within one folder. You then export these folders in batches to your computer (which has to be attached directly since there's no flash drive capability). Then, you have to open each folder and transfer the sole image there to the folder/album on your computer. You cannot name the folders/images as you scan. Perplexingly, trying to do this resulted in the images moved around within the folders on export. No idea how that's even possible. So, it's a bit of a slower process than I'd hoped, but not horrible. Given the huge price jump for other extra-large flatbed scanners with more features, I'm satisfied.