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| RoadWarrior 4D Scanner |
Like its most direct competition, including the Brother DSmobile 720D, the RoadWarrior 4D's ability to duplex gives it a lot more bang for the buck than similar scanners, like Visioneer's own RoadWarrior 3, that lack duplexing, but cost almost as much.
Granted, the RoadWarrior 4D is also a lot less capable than models that include an automatic document feeder (ADF), like the Canon imageFormula P-215II Scan-tini Personal Document Scanner, which is our Editors' Choice for portable document scanners. But models in the Canon scanner's class have a high enough price to leave the RoadWarrior 4D in a sweet spot. Quite simply, it offers the most capability you can get without paying a lot more for the next step up.
Setup and Software
Setup is standard, with the single supplied USB cable providing both
the data connection and power. For my tests, I connected the scanner to a
system running Windows Vista. Except for the lack of a business-card
program, the supplied software nicely covers most general-purpose
business needs, with Visioneer's OneTouch scan utility, both Twain and
WIA drivers so you can scan from virtually any Windows program with a
scan command, and Nuance OmniPage Professional 18 for optical character
recognition (OCR), Nuance PaperPort Professional 14 for document
management, and Nuance Power PDF Standard 1.1 for creating, converting,
and otherwise handling PDF files. Each of these applications is among
the best in its category. Buying them separately could easily cost more
than the scanner.
For most of our standard suite of tests, I used
the OneTouch scan utility, which offers an easy way to scan to a
variety of formats and destinations. The available formats include BMP,
GIF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, image PDF, searchable PDF (sPDF), XLS, HTML, Word
docs, RTF, comma delimited, and Text. You can also send scans to your
printer, a file on a writable optical disc, an FTP site, and SharePoint.
Scanning
The Word doc format gets a small asterisk. The program as originally
shipped produces a file in a slightly incorrect version of DOCX format,
which the current version of Word can still open according to Visioneer,
but the Word 2003 version that we use for testing can't, even with
Microsoft's conversion module for DOCX files installed in Word.
For my OCR tests, I sidestepped the issue by saving to RTF format instead. After I finished testing, Visioneer supplied a fix which I confirmed works, and will be available for downloading. If you install it, the DOC choice will create DOC, rather than DOCX, files. Visioneer also says future discs will include the fix.
Even if you use a current version of Word, it's a good idea to make sure you have the fix, in case you need to send files to someone who's still using an older Word version. According to Visioneer you can check by going to the Add/Remove programs option in Windows Control Panel (which may have a different name depending on your version of Windows), and scrolling down to the OneTouch 4 entry. If it's listed as OneTouch 4 Nuance OmniPage 19.11 OCR Module, you have the version with the problem. The fixed version is OneTouch 4 ScanSoft OmniPage 16.2 OCR Module.
Performance
Scan speed isn't particularly meaningful for manual-feed scanners, since the actual throughput depends largely on how quickly you can feed the paper. To the extent that it matters, however, note that the RoadWarrior 4D is on the slow side.
Scanning to an sPDF file at the default 300 pixels per inch (ppi) and black-and-white mode, I timed the actual scan for one piece of paper at only 10 seconds. However, adding the lag between the feed mechanism grabbing the paper and starting to feed it, plus the lag between finishing the scan and finishing saving the file to disk almost doubled the time, to 19 seconds. As a point of comparison, the Brother DS-720D took 14 seconds for one page, including the lag time.
The RoadWarrior 4D handles document management as well as any manual-feed scanner can, thanks in part to its duplexing, but mostly thanks to the tools that PaperPort brings to the table. It also did a good job on our OCR tests, recognizing text on our Times New Roman test page at sizes as small as 6 points and on our Arial test page at sizes as small as 5 points without a mistake.
Conclusion
If you need to scan more than a few pages at a time, be sure to look at the Canon P-215II, which offers a 20-page ADF and came in at 14.8 pages per minute on our tests for simplex scans and 28.4 images per minute (with one image on each side of the page) for duplex scans.
At the other extreme, if you need a PC-connected scanner that's as small and light as possible, and don't need to scan duplex pages very often, consider the Visioneer RoadWarrior 3 for its slightly smaller size and weight. That said, if you won't be scanning long enough documents to need an ADF, and can make use of the Visioneer RoadWarrior 4D's duplexing even occasionally, the convenience of not having to turn pages over to scan them a second time is well worth carrying around a few extra ounces.
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For my OCR tests, I sidestepped the issue by saving to RTF format instead. After I finished testing, Visioneer supplied a fix which I confirmed works, and will be available for downloading. If you install it, the DOC choice will create DOC, rather than DOCX, files. Visioneer also says future discs will include the fix.
Even if you use a current version of Word, it's a good idea to make sure you have the fix, in case you need to send files to someone who's still using an older Word version. According to Visioneer you can check by going to the Add/Remove programs option in Windows Control Panel (which may have a different name depending on your version of Windows), and scrolling down to the OneTouch 4 entry. If it's listed as OneTouch 4 Nuance OmniPage 19.11 OCR Module, you have the version with the problem. The fixed version is OneTouch 4 ScanSoft OmniPage 16.2 OCR Module.
Performance
Scan speed isn't particularly meaningful for manual-feed scanners, since the actual throughput depends largely on how quickly you can feed the paper. To the extent that it matters, however, note that the RoadWarrior 4D is on the slow side.
Scanning to an sPDF file at the default 300 pixels per inch (ppi) and black-and-white mode, I timed the actual scan for one piece of paper at only 10 seconds. However, adding the lag between the feed mechanism grabbing the paper and starting to feed it, plus the lag between finishing the scan and finishing saving the file to disk almost doubled the time, to 19 seconds. As a point of comparison, the Brother DS-720D took 14 seconds for one page, including the lag time.
The RoadWarrior 4D handles document management as well as any manual-feed scanner can, thanks in part to its duplexing, but mostly thanks to the tools that PaperPort brings to the table. It also did a good job on our OCR tests, recognizing text on our Times New Roman test page at sizes as small as 6 points and on our Arial test page at sizes as small as 5 points without a mistake.
Conclusion
If you need to scan more than a few pages at a time, be sure to look at the Canon P-215II, which offers a 20-page ADF and came in at 14.8 pages per minute on our tests for simplex scans and 28.4 images per minute (with one image on each side of the page) for duplex scans.
At the other extreme, if you need a PC-connected scanner that's as small and light as possible, and don't need to scan duplex pages very often, consider the Visioneer RoadWarrior 3 for its slightly smaller size and weight. That said, if you won't be scanning long enough documents to need an ADF, and can make use of the Visioneer RoadWarrior 4D's duplexing even occasionally, the convenience of not having to turn pages over to scan them a second time is well worth carrying around a few extra ounces.
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