Canon ImageFORMULA DR-X10C

In one way this is not an everyday scanner. In another, it's exactly that. Designed for a duty cycle of up to 60,000 scans per day, it's obviously overkill to use it for the occasional office scan. This machine is aimed at scanning bureaus and at big corporate departments in banks and government organisations. It expects to do a lot of work, even though it manages with a compact footprint and can sit comfortably on a desktop.

The majority of customers will be using the ImageFORMULA DR-X10C for archival - transferring reams (literally) of paper to electronic files, in jpeg, tiff or pdf formats - including encrypted pdf. It's capable of scanning for OCR, too, if you need editable files, though no recognition software is provided.

This is a sheet-feed scanner, which takes pages from a hopper at the front - the hopper folds up onto the front of the machine when it's not in use - and feeds to its top surface, a very similar paper path to a laser printer. The difference here is that the hopper is driven, so it loads a pile of documents up to the feed roller automatically, when you start to scan.

The two key advantages to the ImageFORMULA DR-X10C are speed and the handling of anomalies. The device can handle up to 128 pages a minute in landscape mode and up to 100 in portrait (double this for duplex). It scans at resolutions from 100dpi up to 600dpi. As the scanner runs with its bundled Capture Perfect software, page images flash up on screen at an impressive rate.

Scans can be combined into one big file or saved as separate items and you can use redirection sheets - dividers you print yourself containing simplified barcodes - if you need to direct different stacks of pages to different files. It's a versatile system, though takes a bit of preparation before scanning.