Performing: productivity and xDTR

Many scanners look fast on a spec sheet, but Contex scanners are designed for high performance in the real world. Our scanning solutions optimize all the key factors involved in an effective scanning process. Award-winning software design, smooth and accessible mechanical design, advanced electronics and innovative data processing all work together to create a super efficient and no-hassle scanning experience. That’s what we mean by performance for the real world – twice as fast as the competition.

Measuring Productivity: When your business depends on documents per day, not inches per second…

Inches per second is a good indicator of the maximum speed of a scanner, but it can be misleading when used to estimate productivity. It’s easy to specify inches per second scanning a small format document as there is less data to capture and therefore scanning is faster. However, when scanning larger documents the speed is decreased by 50%. That’s the difference between 3.0ips color scanning speed and 1.5ips!

Scanning productivity depends on four main features:

• Scanner design (easy to feed and scan documents)
• Software design (easy to scan, adjust, index and save files)
• Scanner speed (inches per second for the document size)
• Scanner and PC data transfer rate

Fast scanning requires fast data transfer to the PC. Even though a scanner can capture a document quickly, data transfer to the PC can be very slow – especially when scanning in color. This prevents viewing or editing the scanned image, or scanning the next document in a batch. The result is slower scanning and lower productivity. A fast scanner is important, but the interface speed is critical to the scanning time and the true productivity of the system.

xDTR: (extended Data Transfer Rate)

Contex scanners with xDTR improve overall productivity by increasing the data transfer speed of the USB interface, so more image data can be sent to the PC, faster. This means larger documents (and more documents) can be scanned at higher resolutions without waiting for data transfer to complete. A scanner without xDTR may capture an A2 or C-size color document in eight seconds, while a scanner with xDTR can capture an A1 or D-size color document in the same time, or less. If scanning batches of documents or scanning at 400dpi or more, the difference is even greater.

Let us help you find the right high performance wide format scanning solution for your business