HP ScanJet Enterprise 7000 S2 Sheet-Feed Scanner

The HP ScanJet Enterprise 7000 S2 Sheet-Feed Scanner is a compact yet heavy-duty desktop business scanner for a small to mid-sized office or a busy workgroup, blazingly fast in scanning to image PDF files though relatively slow in scanning to the generally more useful searchable PDF format.

The brown and off-white 7000 S2 measures 12.2 by 7.9 inches (WD) and weighs a hefty 11.8 pounds. It supports a daily duty cycle of up to 3,000 pages, and offers duplex (two-sided) scanning. On top is a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning multipage documents. The scanner has a straight-through paper path, with the paper emerging in front. It has a two-line LCD, which is used to display scan profiles; you can use up and down arrows to switch between them.

With the 7000 S2 come no less than five discs, one with the drivers and two HP scanning utilities, the other four with third-party software. You first install the HP software disc. HP Smart Document Scan lets you create, edit, delete, and prioritize scan profiles, and initiate scans using any of the profiles. The HP Scanner Tools Utility lets you create and manage scan profiles and add them to the LCD, as well as perform maintenance tasks. As some of their functions overlap, I'm not sure why there are two utilities.

The included programs are all of good quality: ReadIris Pro 12 for OCR, CardIris 5.5 for business card recognition, Nuance PaperPort 12 for document management, and Kofax VRS (Virtual ReScan) 5.0.1 Professional for image enhancement and compressing files. They're essentially standalone programs, with no direct integration with HP's scanning suite, and they aren't discussed in the scanner's user guide. (Only Kofax VRS is mentioned in passing, as a way to clean up fuzzy documents and compress files.)

You can initiate scans from the 7000 S2's front panel, selecting your profile from those shown on the LCD. Included profiles are: Auto detect color to searchable PDF sent via email; B&W to searchable PDF; Fast B&W to image PDF; and One button color simplex to image PDF. You can also create and name your own profiles. You can start them from HP Smart Document Scan, from which I did most of the scans in my testing. The scanner's included Twain and ISIS drivers lets you scan from nearly any program that has a scan command, while PaperPort lets you scan to a variety of applications.

The 7000 S2 connects to a computer via USB. I tested it with its drivers and software installed on a PC running Windows Vista.

Scan Speed and Document Management

The 7000 S2 proved very fast at scanning to PDF image files. It scanned a 25-page test document in simplex mode to PDF image format at 200 ppi at 50 pages per minute (ppm), faster than its 45-ppm rated speed. Its tested speed of 83.3 images per minute (ipm), where each side of a page counts as one image, for duplex (two-sided) scanning of a 25-page document is a little slower than its 90 ppm rated speed. Still, both speeds beat out the Editors' Choice Kodak i2600, which we timed at 41.7 ppm for simplex scanning and 76.9 ipm at duplex scanning.

It was less impressive?at least for a scanner of its caliber?in simplex scanning of our 25-page document to searchable PDF, which is generally more useful for document management purposes than image PDF, taking 1 minute 26 seconds to scan and OCR the document. The Kodak i2600 performed the same task in 1:16, while the far more modestly priced Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula DR-C125 put them both to shame, finishing in a minute flat.

The 7000 S2 did well in OCR using ReadIris Pro 12, with error-free text down to eight-point type in our Times New Roman and Arial test fonts, and minor errors at six points. Its business-card scanning using CardIris was less impressive but still decent, with some error-free cards but most having one or more errors. You can scan up to 20 cards at a time with the ADF; it did well despite the occasional misfeed.

The HP ScanJet Enterprise 7000 S2 Sheet-Feed Scanner ($1,099 direct, 4 stars) is a formidable desktop business scanner, blazingly fast in scanning to image PDF, yet relatively slow (at least when compared with top models) in creating searchable PDFs. The Kodak i2600, though slightly slower in scanning to image PDF, was quicker at scanning to searchable PDF, as was the Canon imageFormula DR-C125. The Kodak i2600 has a larger 75-sheet ADF, and a slightly higher duty cycle (up to 4,000 pages per day). But the 7000 S2 is highly capable and worthy of a close look; it's especially good if you expect to scan mostly to image PDFs.

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