Staples Scanning Review

Do you need a high quantity of articles scanned, but you don't want to do it one by one? Well, Staples offers a rather quick scanning service, but like most of their services, is it really that good? Let's look in depth, and see if it's really worth going through the trouble.

Staples has for a long time offered a scanning service, but in the last year it went through a serious reworking. Previous, Staples offered only flatbed scanning (ie: the common scanners that most consumers have. It can only do one sheet at a time, took forever, and was impossible to scan a high quantity of papers), and for a very hefty price. For each page it would cost $6.99, and there was no quantity discount. Just ten sheets would cost you $69.90! Can you imagine having any more than that? It was a joke, and was only utilized by seldom artists if their scanner broke, or if someone desperately needed to email a sheet.

It was from the lack of scanning power, and the ridiculous price, that made them think that this plan should be reworked. With nearly every Staples being issued a Xerox Docucolor 242, higher scanning potential became a reality, as it was a high speed printer/copier with high capacity scanning built in.

With this machine, associates could scan pages just as quickly as if they were feeding it to copy. So instead of one page every two-three minutes, it was now closer to 20-30 a minute. Also, since the licensing price was low they were able to lower the price from $6.99 a page to $0.25. Much, much better.

How do the scans turn out? Most of the time they are good, but it always matters on how good the original was. Also the scans come out in PDF format, an unchangeable document, but you should expect from the scanning procedure that you would not be able to change the original once digital. So far it sounds pretty good, but there is a catch that you normally aren't told about first.

The document is scanned, and it's saved to their hard drive, so how do you get it? You could ask them to burn it to a CD for an extra $10, or save it to your flash drive from an extra $0.25 a file. Since the present price isn't so disgruntling it's not a bad addition, but you do have to take this extra and obligatory charge into account when estimating the price of scanning your files.

While I do not like the extra charge, the quality is usually good and the job can be done very quickly using the Docucolor's technology. The price is also good, and it would be hard to find a better one without some serious digging. I suggest using this for your scanning, but make sure your documents are only 8.5x11 or 11x17 (any bigger costs more as a different machine must be used), and that all the papers are straight and without staples. Curled papers and stapled documents take longer, not to mention that they can get caught in the feeder and will easily rip and shred. Always take that precaution into effect and you will be fine and happy with the job Staples provides.