Tuesday, July 31, 2012

labour-saving with ADF

The Studio recently got a multi-function device (MFD) - the scanner - copier - network printer HP MFP 400 series M425 and I had the pleasure of using the automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning a book. The job which would have taken me around 20 minutes per page of typing - 50 hours - or at least 10 hours of scanning and OCR using my old flatbed scanner, was over in just 1 hour. Proof-reading for corrections took another 5 hours or so for the 150 page Octavo sized book.

Just a word about this particular MFD - the driver software is quite buggy. Noticed so far:
  1. Printing from Windows, there seems to be no way to over-ride the printing on both sides of the paper. Even though the single-side printing is chosen in the print dialog box, printer prints on both sides. While printing from Mac, this issue is not seen.
  2. Scanning with OCR - when done with 'Greyscale' mode and scanning of both sides of the paper is chosen, scanning fails after the first side with an error. Probably the scanning of both sides of the paper with ADF is supported only in 'Black and White' mode.
  3. Device doesn't respond when it is in power-saving mode. Have to remove paper or do something to make the printer "wake up" after which it responds to print (or scan) commands from the network.
  4. Printer is very sensitive to paper jams. The earlier MFD in the Studio was able to print on a wide variety of paper, even thin paper. This one is finicky, jams with paper thinner than "copier paper".

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