Visioneer Strobe 500 - Sheetfed scanner - Duplex - Legal - 600 dpi x 600 dpi - ADF ( 20 sheets ) - up to 500 scans per day - Hi-Speed USB Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)First off, good points:
Build quality feel solid. The device firmly fits into the docking base and scans fast. As a recent Mac convert, I was looking for a full feature scanner for the Mac. I primarily intended to use the scanner to rapidly scan receipts and invoices. I purchased this unit because it claimed to produce searchable PDFs.

Now for the bad news...

First off, no drivers for Mac!!! No TWAIN or ISIS support. Only a third party product ExactScan Lite is bundled. The software seems good enough, but only the pro version produces searchable PDF's (OCR function). The lite version can only produce PDF, not tiff, jpeg or any other image format. The other bundled software, Presto! PageManager can do OCR but only on image formats. So you are a bit out of luck.

The manufacturer's website says:
Text Searchable PDF
If you can't search your scanned documents by their content, you might as well be looking at paper again. The Strobe 500 can scan automatically to searchable PDF. It preserves the integrity of the scanned page so that layout, signatures, logos, photos, etc., remain intact, but the text is OCR'd so that you can search the document by its content. This is very powerful when looking for a single document among hundreds or thousands.

But the undisclosed caveat is that you must be running windows to get the searchable PDF. I called support and after several explanations, they conceded that the scanner really cannot produce a searchable PDF on a Mac. I did look into the Pro version of ExactScan but it's another 100 euros to purchase and has significant issues with the de-skew and auto crop features. Overall for $400 a real disappointment. I just cant imagine a scanner vendor this day and age shipping a scanner out the door without drivers.

I guess I will be returning this unit. I have ordered the Epson scanner which ships with TWAIN drivers. Hopefully it will work better with Mac.

So if you are running Windows, I would not necessarily dismiss this scanner. I was able to get it working in a Windows XP Fusion VM, but for $400 that is no solution for me.

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Product Description:
The Strobe 500 offers the Flexibility to meet the needs of any job. It offers the features you demand in a powerful desktop scanner such as an 20-page Automatic Document Feeder, 30 images per minute duplex scanning speed, and Visioneer OneTouch with Kofax VRS technology.

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