Right before I left for a trip to Texas, I received an order from a net new customer for the replacement of their old digital copier.
When I opened the .pdf that contained three pages, I saw that the quality of the scan was poor — So poor, in fact, that it looked like the document had been faxed.
Those of us in the industry know that scanned documents, especially lease documents, need to be readable. Poor quality scans will not be accepted by the leasing companies.
Therefore, I thought I would post these tips on how to scan higher quality documents from the scanner with your copier.
- Increase the resolution from the default of 200dpi to at least 300dpi. The higher resolution will result in a larger file size, but the document will be sharp, crisp and readable.
- Check to make that the auto color scanning is enabled. This will enable the scanner to scan both black and color documents in a single scan.
- If your document is two sided, enable the two-sided scanning option. That way you’ll only have to scan the two sided document once.
- Your copier may have an additional feature called “blank page detection”. If enabled, blank page detection will automatically delete all blank pages. This is especially useful for two-sided documents with a blank back side page at the beginning and end of the document.
- Enable the OCR detection. This means that all work on every page is indexed. Therefore, when you open the scanned .pdf document, you’ll be able to search it for a certain word, phrase, number, et cetera.
More and more businesses are relying on scanning documents instead of copying and saving paper-based files. That’s a good thing. However, many are not checking those documents for the quality once they have been scanned.
Some copiers will allow you to preview the scanned pages before you scan the document to any location on your network. This one feature can save countless hours of re-scanning if the original documents were not scanned at a high enough resolution (dpi).
Do your homework and ask the rep questions. The reason for asking the rep is that many of these additional scanning features may not be in the manufacturer’s brochure. In addition, they may not work they way you think they would work. Do the research and find a quality rep who knows their system inside and out.
