Home > Consumer Reviews > Xerox DocuMate 252

This is the first scanner I've owned that does everything fast and well. For the past several years I've been scanning paper files to hard disk, to the end of achieving a paperless life.

I bought 7 scanners between 1999 and 2005, including an Epson, an HP, 4 Visioneers, and the Xerox Documate 252. All were either sheet-fed or had document handlers. All but the Xerox Documate were fair to dismal.

I used several of the previous scanners with a succession of Macs, while using others on a PC. For Macintosh the HP scanner software always proved dysfunctional. It failed outright a signficant part of the time. The HP hardware was similarly afflicted. The document feeder choked on a high proportion of documents run through it (for reasons I could neither fathom nor correct). The Epson worked slightly better, but was slow and clunky. Its document feeder frequently stuck, and gagged on something as minor as a slight crease in the paper.

The Visioneers had these and other problems as well. Also, files created in the Windows environment on older versions of Paperport scanning software that was bundled with these scanners (Version 5.5, for example) almost always became corrupted in some way when I transferred them from a PC to a Mac, and vice versa. Therefore I had to keep my Mac and Windows scanned archives on separate computers.

When I bought a Xerox Documate 252, it proved head and shoulders above any scanner I had previously owned or even seen. [The Xerox Documate does share the Visioneer nameplate, but as far as I can tell it has nothing in common mechanically with earlier Visioneers.] It makes one-sided or two-sided scans, in color, greyscale, or black and white. It is fast and accurate. The document feeder handles everything I throw at it (with very occasional paper jams). Also, the more recent versions of Paperport scanning software (9.0 and above) that are bundled with the Documate produce pdf files as the default scans. Pdfs transfer well between Mac and Windows. [Some file names do not transfer fully from Mac to Windows, but all file names transfer from Windows to Mac in my experience. Therefore it is better to do initial scanning in the Windows environment. That is necessary in any event with the Xerox Documate, which functions only on Windows operating systems. The Documate does work well, to my own knowledge, on an Intel-based Mac running Windows XP in Boot Camp. I don't know, however, whether that also obtains for Windows Vista in a similar configuration.]

I got more useful scanning done in 4 weeks after I bought this device than I had accomplished in the previous 6 years.

UPDATE: I've now used the Xerox Documate for over 3 years. It has lived up to its promise, and then some. I bought a second one for a different office; it has worked equally well. I have also bought a Fujitsu Scansnap S500. The Scansnap is a capable scanner, at half the price, but not in the same league with the Xerox Documate 252.

There is one further development worth noting. The latest version of the Paperport scanning software (version 11.0, which I am now running on a Vista platform) handles paper jams more deftly. When the document feeder jams, the scanner now provides the option to save the pages already scanned to the Paperport Desktop and continue with the unscanned pages after unclogging the jam. This is a vast improvement over earlier versions, where a jam on the next-to-last page required a complete do-over. [I did not notice, unfortunately, exactly when this improvement kicked in, so I can't say specifically what level of upgrade is necessary to obtain it.]

SECOND UPDATE September 26, 2009: I am updating this review to report that after 4 and 1/2 years the older of my two Xerox Documate 252s has faltered mechanically. The problem is that the roller in the document feeder does not reliably grip the pages of the documents that I insert for scanning. As a result the scanner sometimes just whirs for a time, then stops. The document must be reloaded at that point and the scanning restarted. It helps to press the documents down and against the feeder, but that defeats the self-executing element of the scanner. My conjecture is that the roller (which is made of rubber) has become harder and has shrunk a little, so that it no longer grips paper with as much friction as in its younger days -- a kind of mechanical equivalent of bone loss. In any event, my original Documate 252 is now in semi-retirement. I still use it for short documents that I can help along by hand through the feeder, but not for long sustained scanning jobs. I have replaced the Documate with a Fujitsu fi-6130, which I unpacked and set up today. When I've had more extended experience with the fi-6130, I'll review it on Amazon.com. Meanwhile, I did try a few quick scans earlier today and was tremendously impressed with the mechanical performance of the fi-6130 (although the software is distinctly unwelcoming and will take time to absorb).

Having just read the other reviews, one of which complained about paper jams, I want to affirm that this really is a remarkable scanner, faster and more efficient by far than any other I've owned. Like the other reviewer who was satisfied with its performance, I would honestly say that it has changed my life too, making me much readier to contemplate converting vast heaps of paper files into digital format. Sure, jamming occurs occasionally, but how could it not? The reviewer who was critical of this aspect of the device isn't being realistic about the challenge of fast sheet feeding. I would say the autofeed function works 95% of the time, and at an astonishingly quick rate. Highly recommended.

I tried to use this scanner in a archiving records application. When it works, it great. The problem is if the paper jams, then you have to turn off the scanner to clear the jam and you lose you whole scanning job! To make it worse, it's concept of paperjams is a page that is wrinkled or has been folded in the past. This just doesn't work when you are scanning old files to digitize them.

Nice try but the flaw makes it a no for use in the real world of document archiving.

I asked Xerox and they said this same problem exists in the 262 also.

We use Adobe Acrobat Pro version 8 to scan documents and at the same time we have it perform automatic OCR all at once. Once scanned and OCR'd with Acrobat, if we need the actual text any time in the future we can 'save as' that document as a Word file. It's a system that works well for our office. So, when we needed another scanner to work with our new Vista machine, I read the reviews and the Xerox 252 came out on top.

Like others have said, this is a very nice scanner. The hardware seems really well made - it's sturdy and sounds like a solid piece of equipment in operation. The feeder works really well and in the four straight hours I tried to get this scanner to work directly with Adobe Acrobat in Windows Vista, it did not jam or double feed one single time. But there's the rub: on Windows Vista, the current twain driver (direct from Xerox's website) doesn't work at all with Adobe Acrobat 8. When you go to scan from within Acrobat, Acrobat completely crashes. (Photoshop can't find this scanner at all using the twain driver.) After Googling for answers and trying many, many things, it just doesn't appear that Xerox (or should I say Visioneer) has completed work on their Vista drivers for this scanner yet. This scanner does work just fine under Vista using the included Paperport software (which has some really great features - when you eventually find them in the non-standard taskbar interface), but this scanner should also work directly with other twain compliant applications like Acrobat Pro 8, but it doesn't at the moment. As a result of this, if you need a scanner for Vista that works directly with Acrobat, the Fujitsu 5120 we have works great directly with Acrobat under Vista (although I like the Xerox hardware better).

What a great product. I searched, researched and found the answer I was looking for - a compact product that I could put lots of paper into and quickly scan into various formats and then file or send back out as email, fax or post to internet (FTP). I also didn't have to have a Phd in computer science to do it. It is plug and play and very intuitive. I have gone from 16 file cabinets to none and drawers full of deal folders to everything on my computer. Life is good!