New Generation Xerox Copier, Printer and Scanner

By Paul R. Kiesel

Years ago I had a fantasy, truth be told I've had a lot of fantasies, which of course I'm NOT going to hare here, but one which you will find of interest is as follows: The daily mail comes into the firm, the ceptionist opens the mail, date stamps each document, and it proceeds to the firm's digital scanner. ach and every piece of mail is then scanned into the firm's data base and, with the push of a button, my ail is sent electronically to my computer's mail box. Now, having been in court all day and not wishing to turn to the office to read my daily accumulation of meet and confer letters, motions for everything (even ome I've never heard of before) and the "occasional" political financial solicitation, I don't need to. My fa sy simply required my logging on to the firm through either a direct modem or the internet and, wallah, I ould be able to review my mail from HOME. That day has finally come! However, the reality of the new gital copiers, scanners etc. has exceeded my wildest expectations. If you are in the market for a new opier, READ this article. If you are NOT in the market for a new copier READ this article and you will be s most of you know who read this column on a monthly basis, I constantly try to find ways to identify tec ology that will increase our firm's productivity, reduce costs and, in the end, make us that much more effi ent. The new generation of copiers will do just that. In approaching the decision to replace our four year-old copier, I knew there were several basic nctions I wanted our new copier to be able to handle. The first step for you in evaluating your copier eeds is to understand the extent of the applications you will require from your copier. I realized that we ere doing at least 25,000 copies per month and we were sending a substantial number of box loads of ocuments out for commercial copying. One of my goals was to find a machine that was efficient enough avoid the out sourcing of copying that we had begun to rely upon. I spent several months evaluating di rent manufacturers' copier specifications, applications and costs of ownership. While we ultimately elected the Xerox copier for our office, you must do your own independent research to figure out what wi ork best in your office. OK, that said, let me tell you what this new generation of digital copiers is capab . I am going to refer to the Xerox machine we're now using, but I am in no way attempting to endorse ne company over another. bin attached which would collate as many as 25 copies. You know the machine: you would select 25 opies of a document which was 20 pages in length and your copier would begin the process of feeding ne page per bin level for all 25 levels and the copy job would begin. Any one approaching the machine r the next 15 minutes or so would have to wait until you were done with your copy job before they could egin to copy their work. (A significant waste of time.) Often times, at least I found, during this copy ocess the machine would "jam" and I would become a copy repair person trying to trace the errant shee paper through a maze of rollers, heat shields and ink. Here's how the new digital copiers work. First, and perhaps most importantly, the new copiers are onnected directly to your firm's network. All of the new generation digital copiers are also PRINTERS. his means that rather then printing to our HP3, 4, or 5, we print directly to the Xerox machine. The achine has 6 paper trays and I simply select the "letter head" paper tray and the machine prints out my tter. Xerox has done a cost comparison between printing on the Hewlett Packer printers versus the erox machine. Hold on to your check book. They've calculated that the cost of printing a page on the H between 6 to 8 cents per page as opposed to 1.25 cents per page on the Xerox. Consider that for a oment! The math when multiplied by the thousands adds up. But wait, there's more, much, much more et's go back to the example discussed above. You've got a 20 page document you need 25 copies of. ow, rather then printing out the document on your HP and having to walk over to your copier and print th opies, your secretary, paralegal, or even you, can print it one time from your desk top directly to the copi- . Rather then the copier going through the old tried and true process of spitting out each page into the orting bin, the digital copier does the collating electronically and simply produces the entire document, ompleted in one "lump." Thus, rather then pulling off 25 separate copies from your sorting bin, you simpl ave 25 lumps, one on top of the other, waiting for you when you approach the machine. Further, you are o longer limited by the size of your sorting bin but can choose any number of collated copies, e.g. 30, 50 even 100. The machine appears to work flawlessly. It has significantly fewer "moving" parts and there- re, the jams, at least so far, are non-existent. Best of all, if your paralegal has a quick print job, he can s cued up job will run without his having to sit by the machine and wait for it to be "free." When used as a printer, the Xerox automatically prints out a separator page indicating from whose achine the document was printed. This is a great time saver, alone: my not having to rummage around rough the documents sitting on top of the HP5 trying to figure out which one was the document I printed Now for the cherry on the top. Although this software will not ship for another 6 weeks, I have been ssured the Xerox will be able to perform the following function. In addition to copying and printing 65 ages a minute, the Xerox will be able to scan 65 pages a minute as well. The machine can scan up to 000 pages for a single named document. Although the feeder will only take 50 pages per stack, you can ombine these into a single scan of up to 2000 pages. So, for example, you could scan in an entire med- al record and save the document using a single name e.g., "Smith Kaiser hospital records." The possibi es here are endless. Further, from the Xerox machine itself you will be able to direct the destination of e scan images to any person's "mail box" which is listed on the digital key pad of the machine. Thus, m oal of having the mail scanned in on a daily basis and forwarded to the attorney, paralegal, secretary, etc all but a reality. Once scanned in, there is software provided, that will allow you to convert the scanned ocuments in to an OCR (optical character recognition) format so you can actually edit or search the text e document. The cost of delivering these services is significantly lower then the former technology, and the multi sking which the new generation digital copiers are capable of is worth its weight in gold. There are a lot ore options available, but you'll have to experience the joy of investigating the machine of your choice to arn the rest.