Paperless home/office

[Hobbit]

Hello everyone,

I'm thinking of adopting a paperless system at my home/office whereby i scan all my incoming mail into the computer then get rid of the paper. Such a system would be a big relief from the endless piles of documents around.


Are there any systems/scanners that are designed for such a job? what are your recommendations on the easiest way to do this?

Thank you.

 

[xfiftyfour]

others may have better (cheaper, anyway) suggestions, but the first thing that came to mind is a sheet-fed scanner. we use one at work over the network (goes from the scanner to the scanner's hd and then over to our server) to archive old job folders. they're *much* easier than flat-bed, because you can just leave a pile of papers sitting, and it'll 'suck' each in one-by-one.

also, you can set up categories and it'll sort the papers into these folders on the computer, which i imagine would be a very handy tool for someone who's going to be converting ALL of their documents to digital.

here is the one that we use at our office:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15179-64175-64404-12126-64404-25324.html

and here is the one that my fiance uses at his:
http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/peripherals/scanners/workgroup/s500.html

 

[ChrisWB]

My father uses a Ricoh machine similar to the one xfiftyfour described. I recommend staying away from the Ricoh's and checking out the HP's.

 

[Kwyjibo]

My advice will not be all that helpful ... because while my office uses this type of technology ( not for you exact reasons but for your same purpose)
we use this machine (http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/e...44-410636-12004-f55-415204-415212-415213.html) but its very large scale for your needs. It works pretty well and its really nice to scan something and email the pdf to someone in your directory or email it to yourself and send it to whoever.

The direct to PDF feature is so nice, whenever I have stuff for mass distribution its the way to go! We even have an image site running, so I can just give people the document number and they can look it up if they need it.

 

[Hobbit]

Thanks for the replies

It seems i can buy many more extra filing cabinets for the price of one of these scanners. Maybe i should stick with paper for the time being unless someone else have a cheaper suggestion.

 

[PlaceofDis]

well if you take a look around on HP's site, in their home and home office section they have some cheaper paper fed scanners which would probably work for your purposes, they won't be as fast, but if thats not an issue then it might be easier.

i too would love to do something like this, not only because its a lot of paper sitting around, but its a lot of space being taken up when i don't have much to begin with. yeah you could buy more filing cabinets, but if you have have to move or send a document to someone, its not going to be as easy either.

 

[sushi]

Brother has some nice multipurpose products that might suit your needs, for example:

http://www.brother-usa.com/mfc/mfc_detail_AREA=MFC_1&PRODUCTID=MFC8440.aspx

I have the printer portion of this multipurpose device and it works very well.