HP Digital Sender Flow 8500 fn2 Document Capture Workstation Review - Review 2022

High-stop network document scanners continue getting slicker and more than self-contained. The HP Digital Sender Flow 8500 fn2 Document Capture Workstation ($2,999.99) has sophisticated features including a congenital-in scanner interface and onboard hard deejay for saving files. It may cost an eye-watering $1,000 more than the Editors' Selection Canon imageFormula ScanFront 400, but it'south faster and richer in features, making it our top choice for high-volume scanning in a midsize to large office or enterprise setting.

No Desktop Scanner Here

Measuring 10.4 by twenty.2 past 23 inches (HWD) and weighing 38.5 pounds, the Period 8500 is huge and apparently not designed to sit down beside you on your desktop. Unlike the Canon ScanFront 400 ($one,587.38 at Amazon) , which is half the size and nigh 30 pounds lighter, the Menses 8500 is a flatbed scanner with a 150-sail automatic document feeder (ADF) for sending huge stacks of originals to the flatbed. The ScanFront, on the other hand, is a desktop document sail-feed scanner with a threescore-sheet ADF. Closer to the Menstruation 8500 in volume, size, and price is the Kodak i3300 ($iii,799.95 at Amazon) (some other Editors' Selection), which is a few inches smaller than the HP model and merely 3.8 pounds lighter.

The Menstruum 8500 has a ten,000-scan daily duty cycle, far more than the ScanFront's half dozen,000 scans. The Kodak i3300's duty cycle is, on the other hand, 17,500 pages daily. Where the Menstruation 8500 steps out front, though, is with its built-in qwerty keyboard that slides out from the front of the chassis, and an internal hd for saving and managing scans, not to mention the 8-inch tilting tablet that acts every bit the device'due south control console. The Canon ScanFront, while not near as robust, comes with a x.1-inch tablet-like control panel.

Connections and Software

Connectivity choices on the Catamenia 8500 are slim, including just Ethernet x/100/1000 and connecting to a unmarried PC via USB. There is no Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, or any other connexion blazon requiring a radio, though there are two USB ports, i in the front for connecting thumb drives and one in the rear for linking devices such every bit additional storage.

In add-on to the Certificate Capture Workstation on the HP Menses 8500'southward firmware, yous also get a few scanning utilities and document-management programs, such as HP Scan, a uncomplicated merely competent interface that HP ships with all its scanners, besides every bit Document Scanner, and a few others.

Besides on the disk is Nuance PaperPort, a popular document-direction program for archiving your scanned documents. And as if that'south not enough, you can download Readiris and Cardiris and several other utilities. Readiris is a popular OCR programme for converting scanned text to editable text, and Cardiris is a business card scanning and archiving program.

Ahead of the Pack

Typically, nosotros test a scanner's speed past connecting information technology to a USB port on a computer and and so mensurate how quickly it scans to and processes the scans on the PC. While you can ready up the Catamenia 8500 that fashion, that's not really the way it's designed to exist used and the least likely way to get the most value out of the scanner. In addition, it comes with many dissimilar programs that support scanning. I tried a few of them and got slightly different results with each one. The preferred (and fastest) method is to operate the scanner through its own interface and let it do almost of the processing, but it would be impractical to compare those results to the other scanners we've tested.

Hence, I tested the Catamenia 8500 using PaperPort over USB 3.0 from our testbed Intel Core i5-equipped PC running Windows x Professional. HP rates the Menstruum 8500 at 100 pages per infinitesimal (ppm) for one-sided scans, and 200 images per minute (ipm, where each side is considered a folio) for two-sided scans. While I was able to get it to scan almost that fast (94ppm and 186ipm) without the lag time required to process and save the scans to a usable format (for our purposes, image or searchable PDF), our testbed estimator and PaperPort weren't capable of processing and saving the pages at those speeds.

It did come up close, though: The Flow 8500 scanned our 25-folio i-sided text document to image PDF at the rate of 83.2ppm and our 2-sided fifty-folio document at 150.3ipm. The ScanFront managed only half that fast, and Kodak's i3300 came in at 69.5ppm and 138.2ipm. The HP Flow 8500 scanned the same two-sided 50-page document to searchable PDF in 46 seconds, compared with the Kodak i3300's 1 minute 9 seconds. However, like I said, the method I used hither is the least-efficient use for this scanner. Near buyers, I doubtable, will be incorporating it into an existing document-direction arrangement or with the Document Capture Workstation interface.

Beauteous Accuracy

When information technology comes to overall value accurateness trumps speed. I'd much rather requite up a few seconds of browse and process time than spend several minutes correcting errors. Plus, scanners similar these are designed for automated systems with as footling user intervention as possible.

That said, the Period 8500 scanned our Arial font folio down to half dozen points without errors and down to 8 points on our Times New Roman page. The Canon ScanFront tied that score, and the Kodak i3300 did slightly meliorate, by also scoring 6 points without errors on our Times New Roman folio.

Network Scanning on Steroids

The humongous and powerful HP Digital Sender Flow 8500 is not for every office or workgroup. It's expensive, but its amenities, such equally its onboard software, hard disk, keyboard, and touch interface, are designed to help develop and maintain a fast and efficient document capture surroundings. Its mix of operation and top-of-the-line features arrive our pinnacle pick for high-volume scanning in a large part, workgroup, or enterprise environment.

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Further Reading

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• Microsoft App Turns Your Phone Into a 3D Scanner
• Get Organized: Choose the Right Scanner for Going Paperless

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/home/20264/hp-digital-sender-flow-8500-fn2-document-capture-workstation-review

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