relevant but OT: automatic document scanning

--- On Sat, 6/16/12, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: And therein lies the rub. Or rather, the jam and misfeed. The easiest kind of paper in the world to pick and feed is cheap, generic 20 pound copier paper. The kind you buy by the case with the office supply store's name brand on it. It's rough enough that it's easy to pick, slick enough that it rarely sticks together, and is overall a very, very easy thing for a printer (or document feeder) to pick and feed. High quality, expensive paper - while it looks nice - is very difficult to pick and feed. Usually it's much thicker, slicker, and heavier. One customer I had was printing lots of mailings on a 4350. The tray with the letterhead in it needed new rollers constantly, since just a little wear would cause the machine to fail to pick the slick, expensive, pre-printed forms. And even the third party replacement rollers, when new, had issues picking this paper. You had to use HP genuine rollers. But, the same tray, loaded with cheap copy paper, never had problems. You could run the rollers until they were slick and shiny and they'd still pick the "Bent Staple Brand Office Paper" with no problems. When scanning docs, you run into problems with not only the paper stock, but the age and condition of the paper. Manuals that have lived their entire life in a three ring binder will be curly at the edge, and the places where the holes are punched will usually cause the pages to hang up against each other. Magazines with the spines cut off are too slick to auto-feed in most machines. Book paper is an unusual size, and tends to get "fuzzy" at the edges. Basically, what I'm trying to say, is despite the fact that "picking and feeding paper" is a known and solved problem - "picking and feeding clean new paper to print on" and "picking and feeding old documents to scan" are really two separate problems with two different sets of variables. Yes, they're similar in implementation, but the latter requires more precision and more safeguards against misfeeding than the former, since the way clean new copy paper behaves is very predictable, and the way random 30 year old once-bound-but-now-is-not paper behaves is not. And, related (yet off the off-topic) anecdote - I once serviced an HP 4250 with a MAMMOTH paper jam in the front of the machine. It was as though somehow the printer had picked and fed 20 sheets at once! To the point where I had to dismantle a fair bit of it to get it all out. Nothing seemed damaged, the rollers were in good condition, and upon reassembly, everything appeared normal, and the printer printed without misfeeding. I ran a long paper path test to test for misfeeds and jams, and could find nothing else wrong. At this point, the printer was low on paper, so I grabbed a fresh ream out of the case next to the printer to refill it before I left. The paper was Hewlett-Packard branded. Like all reams of paper, the stack of 500 sheets comes wrapped in a paper(or heavy plastic) wrapper, which is folded around the stack and glued. Well, it would seem that when this ream, and evidently the ream just before it, was wrapped off-center. The flaps on one end were too large, and the flaps on the other end were too short - not long enough to completely cover the end of the paper. Thus, the glue that's supposed to glue the wrapper together around the paper was gluing about 20 sheets of paper together into a essentially a notepad. I have no idea if the customer contacted HP about this. I suggested that perhaps they should, since, it was HP brand paper, and an HP brand printer, which required a service call due to the glued-together paper getting stuck. But I was sure to explain how to fan BOTH ends of the new ream before putting it in the drawer! -Ian