This is a great scanner.

I have some 10,000 pages to scan, many of which are single sheets, and so began looking for a reasonably priced ADF scanner.

I combed the Net for a month and found no reviews for two new (May, 2003) products: the Visioneer 9450 USB (list $400) or the cheaper HP ScanJet 5550C (list $300). I bypassed the identical Visioneer 9450 PDF which for an extra $100 includes a copy of Adobe Acrobat--a great deal if you do not already have it.

Our university just purchased a bunch of HP scanners and they are not (IMHO) worth the plastic they're printed on. Every single unit had to be opened to clean the glass which was filthy. One unit had an awful green streak on every scan. Opening the unit showed someone in quality control (now there's a misnomer) did not remove some plastic flash from the movable light source.

Not having any experience pro or con with Visioneer, but having some really bad experiences with HP, I decided on the Visioneer.

Found a great deal at $280 from CDW on the e-opinion page, which was considerably lower than anyone else. There was a 1-2 week backorder, but I could wait to save $120. (BTW, going to the CDW home page and searching for the same Visioneer 9450 yielded a much higher price).

My company has purchased from CDW for over eight years, and their staff is really a delight to work with. After placing the online order they actually called to see that I was satisfied. Then, when they were restocking, the price went up $20 and they called again to appologize and to make sure I still wanted the scanner. This kind of customer service approaches my all time favorite vendor: New Egg

The anticipated 1-2 week wait ended up being 5 days. The one thing missing from the experience was that CDW does not provide tracking information, so one has to guess how long the transit will be.

The unit comes unassembled (naturally), but took us 5 minutes to "snap" the items into place. The quick install sheet clearly defined the steps for our XP Pro workstation. For some strange reason the scanner could not make the USB connection, and we moved the scanner to another XP Pro, and within 10 minutes of installing the software we were off and scanning!

The ScanSoft 8.0 software is a bit clunky, and could use some streamlining to reduce mouse clicks (version 9.0 update is still not available as of 6/12/03).

Placed 10 pages to scan with ADF B/W at 300 dpi, and was impressed with speed and low noise. Having read some reviews of earlier Visioneer ADF models I was aware that pages might jam. After the quick scan we noted that several pages were crinkled or edges folded over, and everything went through just fine.

Icon of scanned material then shows up on the PaperPort screen and allows for one-button click to send to my existing Adobe Acrobat 5 software. Had a bit of an initial problem in that PaperPort kept reporting that Acrobat was not installed. One can not remove the icon from the list, but I could hide it, which I did. Then added the real Acrobat by linking to the exe within PaperPort.

Times:
to scan 5 full color document pages: 50 seconds
to send all 5 pages into an Adobe PDF: 3 seconds!
to save to file: 5 seconds.
So, under one minute to scan 5 pages, transfer to Adobe PDF, and record to hard disk. (as the 9450 uses USB 1.1 and the HP 2.0, I was more than pleased to see the throughput times).

The PaperPort software gives an estimate of one meg per page for B/W at 300 dpi. PaperPort saved the 5 page scan in its own .max format at 168k on the HD. The PDF resides on the HD at 158k for the 5 pages, making it easy to email attach.

Also tried some color picture scans on the flatbed. At the end of the scan I tried using the PaperPort built-in image software, but obviously this package is first and foremost designed for documents. While the 9450 comes bundled with ArcSoft PhotoImpression, I will bypass and use Photoshop as usual.

I was pleased by one other bundled software: TextBridge Pro 9.0 which I plan to put to use sometime soon.