When companies are refreshing their fleet of document scanners, they don’t want—and can’t afford—to compromise quality. No business, government agency, or healthcare organization wants to swap their outdated document scanners with 20, 100, or even more systems that underperform and fall short of expectations. To that end, it’s important to understand what defines a quality document scanner.
To get to the heart of what’s driving trends and decisions in document scanning solutions these days, Epson group product manager Tim Anderson provided a few valuable insights from his experience.
Q: What is one of the biggest mistakes organizations make when they’re purchasing document scanners in terms of their ability to deliver the high-quality solutions they had hoped for?
A: Once a company installs a product, they want it to work. They can’t afford downtime. When they “go cheap” and put a lower price above every other consideration, there is a higher risk of the product failing.
Q: So, a big part of quality is reliability, right from the start and all through the product lifecycle. What aspects of reliability are most closely tied to quality?
A: IT managers want peace of mind. They don’t want the risk of buying document scanners that can’t be relied upon to seamlessly integrate with their software. Companies have their own document management workflows and electronic content management processes that scanners must support.
In the healthcare space, for example, doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies maintain patient information using electronic healthcare records (EHR) with software such as Allscripts or Epic. The document scanner must be able to seamlessly identify and send images as digital files to the records management application that these organizations have standardized on.
Epson document scanners are highly capable of meeting those requirements. We can assure potential customers about our products’ compatibility with these applications because we perform testing with the application companies that offer these opportunities. Our products also are TWAIN- and ISIS-certified to ensure seamless integration.
Q: Any other features companies should be thinking about as part of their quality evaluations?
A: One consideration is that organizations generally aren’t scanning just one page at a time. Mostly they are scanning multiple pages at once. Our automatic document feeder accommodates that; our document scanners can automatically load up to 100 sheets.
Also, many other document scanners use poor-quality rollers, which means that they often miss scanning some documents in a file. Epson document scanners distinguish themselves by using rollers that are made with high-quality plastics and sensors to detect double-feeding and prevent scanning errors. We hear users complain that other vendors’ rollers having to be replaced after just 20,000 or 30,000 scans. Most rollers in Epson document scanners are rated for 200,000 scans before replacements are needed.
To use a car analogy, it’s like tires in a car; you need quality ones, or road handling isn’t going to be good.
We’re proud that Keypoint Intelligence’s Buyer’s Lab has rated the reliability and media handling of one of our document scanners it tested—the DS-780N document scanner—as Excellent. It noted that it was able to scan 25,000 pages without a jam, misload, or malfunction and that the 100-sheet capacity is one of the highest currently available in its class.
Q: What assurances does Epson make that support the idea that its scanners are of premium quality?
A: For one thing, there’s our three-year warranty with next business day replacement of any document scanner if needed. We are comfortable offering that extended warranty because we have complete confidence in the quality of our product.
Another thing that we think showcases the assurance we have in the quality of our document scanners is that we offer a free scanner for qualifying companies with more than 500 users; they can pick from among five or six models to try out. They can keep the scanner whether they decide to buy it or not. It’s theirs with no obligation at all. We’re pretty confident that their trial use of an Epson document scanner will convince them of its quality, and that it will be one of their top candidates to consider when it’s time for a refresh.
