NeatDesk 698 Desktop Scanner and Digital Filing System for Mac

I really really really wanted to like this scanner. I received the unit on Friday and had planned on spending Saturday scanning in all my documents and then relaxing on Sunday. I am sooooo disappointed with the quality of the scans and software when scanning in documents like car insurance or doctors statements that I am sending it back.

The main issue is that the manufacture’s web site states that the scanner can scan grayscale and B/W documents in at a rate of 25 PPM. This is an outright lie on one level and a stretching of the truth on another level.

First let me start off with the truth stretching. The scanner is very fast while scanning in B/W images but it did not seam like it was 25 PPM fast so I timed it using a stop watch. I was able to scan in a page (two sides) in 6.4 seconds that’s 10 PPM not 25! As Fujitsu rates their ScanSnap S1500M at 20 PPM whether you scan one or two sides, I assumed I would see the NeatDesk scanner do the same. Thinking that they (NeatCo) must have been playing with some slick marketing numbers when they came up with the 25 PPM rate I figured I would see the 10 PPM rate double to 20 if I only scanned one side of a page instead of two. I was very disappointed to see that the rate did not change between one or two sides. Normally I would think that 10 PPM is a very quick scan, which it is, but it is more than half as fast as advertised.

That was the truth stretching now onto the lie.

My main complaint is not the scan rate of B/W or grayscale scans. I would be very happy with a 10 PPM grayscale document scanner. The problem is that the scanner / software package does NOT scan in grayscale. The scanner DOES send the images to my iMac in GRAYSCALE and then the horrible software converts it to B/W. Yes you heard me right! They take a perfectly legible (8 bit, 256 levels of black) grayscale image and turn it into a very poor quality B/W (2 bit, 2 color) illegible image. I can’t for the life of me understand why they would do such a thing.

If you are only interested in scanning in receipts, which by their nature are only black and white, then you might be happy with the software. Unfortunately about 95% of the stuff I wanted to scan is various types of documents / kids school work / insurance papers / medical records etc. If you have ever looked at these kinds of documents you will notice that most of them have shaded areas on the page that highlight important text. These shaded areas, along with the text, usually become unreadable when converted to B/W. Not only can I not able to read them the OCR can’t detect them either. It makes me angry to see a scan show up on the screen that looks GREAT only to have it destroyed a few seconds later by the software as it converts it to black and white.

I contacted NeatCo about the ability to scan to grayscale. Their support person was very nice and polite; unfortunately she confirmed for me that the software does not support grayscale. Her response is at the end of the review.

You may think that I should just scan in color. Unfortunately scanning in color is very slow. A color scan took 15 seconds for a single sided page and 27.5 seconds for a single 2-sided page (weird that color scans do double the time for 2 sides unlike the BW option). At this rate it puts color scans in at 2 PPM not the 8.5 reported on their web site. At 2 PPM it will take me several hundred hours to scan everything I need to scan.

The quality of color scans is very good if you are willing to wait 30 seconds for a single 2-sided scan.

Here are my timing results for the BW, color, 1 side and 2 sided document. All times are for a single sheet of paper.

Page Sides | Color Mode |Time to Scan |Total time to scan & OCR 1st page

1 | Color | 15 sec | 52 sec

2 | color | 27 sec | 1:15 (m:sec)

1 | BW | 6.4 sec | 36 sec

2 | BW | 6.5 sec | 40 sec

Just for reference I have a late 2008 24” iMac with 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4 gigs of ram. I have also updated the NeatDesk software to their latest version as of 10/30/2009 which is 2.1.9

I have taken some screen shots of the grayscale images before they are converted to BW and will try to post them to Amazon. In the screen shots you can see that the initial image looks very nice. If NeatCo fixes this issue the package might be worth a look.

Here is the NeatCo response to my grayscale question.

Response (Campbell) – 10/29/2009 08:45 PM

Hi Chris,

There’s no way to set to scan in a gray scale at this time. I will put in a feature request to our developers so they can include this capability in future releases.

Question Reference #091029-000359

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Product Level 1: NeatDesk for Mac

Date Created: 10/29/2009 08:45 PM

Last Updated: 10/29/2009 08:45 PM

Status: Solved

Rating: 1 / 5

I spent days scanned thousands of pages of large, important docs into this scanner. Once I saw them, I discarded the originals. Only later did I learn that you cannot export anything larger than 100 pages, so the pages were visible only on the viewer. Still later, the file became corrupt, so I have irretrievably lost valuable and irreplaceable documents. After many hours of troubleshooting (and memory upgrades), Neat Receipt told me the file had become corrupted. They also acknowledged that there is no way to know from the documentation that they do not support 100+ page docs until you try to export one.
Rating: 1 / 5

The scanner device is high quality and well designed from both a functional and industrial design standpoint. Scanning can be initiated from the software interface or, directly, from one of two buttons on the scanner itself. The only issue I have encountered with the scanner is that it has a difficult time recognizing cab receipts printed from a meter are in sitting the “receipt” hopper ready to be scanned.

The major issue with this product is the software: it is very, very unstable. Out of of 11 scanning sessions, 8 have hung due to the scanner going into an “inconsistent state”. There is a scanner hopper designated for receipts. Other issues with the software:

- OCR on business cards only gets it about 50% correct. Much manual editing is required.

- OCR analysis of receipt content is mostly wrong. Not useful

- The software presumes a particular expense reporting workflow and, because this is so inflexible, very little of this functionality is useful if one must prepare expense reports differently.

I would wait at least two more generations before buying this product. A good printer-scanner well integrated with a PC is just as useful and far less costly.
Rating: 1 / 5