News

DataMaster Lab Award for Scanners 2022: Best Overall Productivity is achieved by Canon and Fujitsu machines

24 May 2022

DataMaster Lab is completely independent from the equipment manufacturers whose products we test. We derive no revenue from testing, nor from our evaluations, certifications - and not from our Digital Imaging Awards either.

We have been testing printing equipment since 2009, and our services are dedicated to helping sales and marketing teams who distribute copiers, printers, and, since 2020, scanners. We know what buyers need. We know how to differentiate products in the office market place.

Here at DataMaster Lab, we have developed advanced tools and methods for timing processes. We have been doing it for over a decade now.

We have found many strengths and weaknesses that even product managers miss - and this is one of them.

Canon and Fujitsu scanner sales teams and product managers, take note!

Scanners are rated in images per minute, the number of page sides that the device can pull through in a minute. But then the software has to process the images, clean them up - and probably OCR and compress them too before saving them to a folder on the host computer. While the software is doing this, the scanner is blocked, and so is the user.

Even we can scarcely believe how wide the variation is, across ranges and manufacturers. A regular process like OCR and file compression can be almost instantaneous on one product - a few seconds' wait does not harm the user's productivity; this is the time it takes to load the next batch. Yet exactly the same process can take nearly two minutes on a similiar, competing product from another manufacturer! Two minutes is time to get bored, distracted and frustrated on the company time.

When you measure the total time from starting to scan the batch until the pdf is delivered to the local directory, and divide this my the number of page sides in the batch, you get the Overall Productivity of the machine in Images Per Minute.
We publish Overall Productivity figures for all the scanners and multifunctions we test in a variety of real-world business scenarios.

The differences between machines are huge - and even some manufacturer's product managers are simply unaware of this gaping issue.

The Overall Productivity of a scanner depends on how quickly its software can process images performing OCR and file compression.

The Canon and Fujitsu scanners that have won this award deliver FIFTEEN times faster than some of their competitors with similar mechanical scan speeds.

Edward Bilson, Technical director of DataMaster Lab said, "These scanners and their software compress and OCR large documents in seconds, not minutes. They do not keep their users waiting around!"

The Award is available to subscribers to the sales-enablement service DataMaster Online on the product pages of the machines concerned, and from our public website. High-resolution versions of the Awards and Rosettes are available upon request.