Review: Scanjet Automatic Document Feeder
Hewlett Packard
$199

The HP Scanjet Automatic Document Feeder (adf) is an attachment for the HP Scanjet 5100, HP Scanjet 5200 Business Series, HP Scanjet 6200 and HP Scanjet 6300 Professional Series Scanners. It allows you to load up to 25 pages of loose paper and by clicking on a button the pages will be scanned into your computer. (The adf was tested on the HP 5730C scanjet)

Albeit rather noisy, it works.

Instillation is very simple: the original lid of the scanner lifts off vertically and the adf slips into the lid's attachment holes. There is a plug that goes into the "adf" socket in the back of the scanner that (if your eyes are not too old) actually reads "adf" in very small letters.

The adf is hinged so once in place, the adf does not prevent the user from placing standard photos or paper sizes or types not recommended into the document feeder.

Installing paper is rather curious, there is a blue lever to the left-back of the scanner that one places in the "1" position. Then, once the paper is in place, one places the lever to the "3" position. I'm not sure what happened to the "2" position, but it's not there to be used.

Paper is placed into the adf as you see it--pages facing with 1st page on top. HP recommends nothing smaller than 5.8 inches x 8.3 inches, and nothing larger than 8.5 x 14 inches. The good thing here is that this means you can input legal size paper into a scanner only big enough for standard letter size paper.

The most likely use for a document page feeder is for performing OCR. Among the accompanying software with a scanjet from HP is Read Iris, an OCR program. I'm sorry to say that from what I experienced here, there is no wonder that HP gives this away. It's junk.

Fortunately, HP is now supplying a TWAIN driver with their scanners (they didn't originally) and I could use OmniPage OCR software and it worked like a charm. You can set it for scanning all the pages at once and then OCRing them or for one-at-a-time processing.

The obvious negative is that if you wish to run multiple pages from a book you must first photocopy each page prior to running them through the adf. HP also supplies a copy of "HP ScanJet Copy Utility" which does a fairly nice job of letting one use a scanner as a photocopier at speeds longer than using a standard photocopier, but much shorter than scanning a full page and trying to print via PhotoShop.

Its big negative is that at $199, it's more expensive than many scanners, and at only supporting 25 pages at a time, there is still too much hand holding for multi-multi page documents. However, for small offices where 25 pages is just about right, it surely beats feeding page after page after page...