The paperless world just got a whole lot closer

I dreamed of a day when I could:

1. scan in all our clients' documents so they could be reformatted and sent around the country without using FedEx;
2. Get rid of our dedicated photo copier and fax machine;
3. Make low-cost color photo copies using only my computer and color laser printer;
4. Use optical character recognition to create editable text from large documents without having to have my secretary type it all from scratch.

Unless you are willing to spend a lot more money than the cost of the 5590, there really is no other way to accomplish my dream. The 5590 is the ONLY flatbed scanner under $2500 that has a decent sheetfeeder. This feature alone is why my dream has come true. I replaced my single copier and fax with five 5590's and there are no more line-ups at those dedicated machines, space is better utilized, productivity is up, and there is less paper clogging our offices and our files.

When set to photo-copy or fax type of resolution, it scans as quickly as our former photocopier and jams less often. Combined with our networked color laser printer, we can print off b/w or color copies almost as fast, and at a fraction of the cost, as those dedicated self-serve machines at Office Depot. It even scans double-sided well.

The 5590's have allowed us to get rid of our dedicated fax machine and phone line and go to an e-mail based fax system from our phone company (Telus). The cost works out to be about the same, but our productivity is way up as everyone has their own fax numbers and they can retrieve faxes when they are out of the office.

The 5590 does a decent job with photos, but it could be better and overall it could be faster, however, given the cost it's really hard to justify a complaint. It has made my dream come true.

UPDATE: It has been about a year since I installed five of these in our office and I still have no complaints. One of my employees started complaining that the sheetfeeder on her unit was jamming all the time, but it turns out she was always stuffing the feeder to its maximum limit of 50 pages. Keeping it under 40 pages at a time solved the problem. The only other jamming issue we've had is dealing with previously stapled pages, which can be a problem with any sheet feeding mechanism. Riffling the pages before feeding them through usually prevents jamming.