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The Raven Pro: A high-volume document scanner that flies like the wind

128

David Gewirtz

for DIY-IT

| October 8, 2021

| Topic: Hardware

I never really identified with Tim Allen’s “more power” mantra from Home Improvement until I became a homeowner. When you live in an apartment, you don’t need to have an extra-powerful chainsaw to cut through tough-as-steel tree limbs, or need an excavator to clear out dump truck after dump truck of dirt to make sure water drains away from your house. But when you own a home, many homeowner projects call out for “more power.”

Likewise, if you’re not dealing with a tremendous number of paper documents, you might not understand why you’d need a scanner with More Power. In fact, you might not even identify with needing a scanner. But if you’re dealing with boxes of documents from an estate you’re suddenly managing, or if you are a realtor with enormous paper contracts, or if you’re digitizing a storeroom of older documents, you know that the time it takes to scan a stack of documents adds up.

Also: Best scanners: Fujitsu, Canon, Kodak, Epson, and more

Back in 2013, my wife and I woke up one morning to a moving truck delivering all my parents’ documents in cartons to our garage. It was floor to ceiling boxes. My parents were elderly, ill, and needed our support. We had to take over… everything.

My parents did not practice dostadning, the Swedish practice of “death cleaning.” The idea of death cleaning is you clean up and declutter your stuff before you die, so your kids don’t have to deal with it. To my beloved parents, declutter was as foreign a word as dostadning.

And so, we suddenly had a garage filled with documents — many of which my wife and I would need in order to manage their care. For example, somewhere in all those boxes was the insurance policy for their long term care. Somewhere, in hundreds of cartons, with no organizational system whatsoever.

Somewhere…

Our only chance of coming up to speed was to scan everything in and try to sort through it.

To do so, I repurposed one of my Mac minis and bought a . We also paid a young friend to spend all day sitting in front of the computer, scanning stacks of documents and labeling the PDFs. Each day after she left, we moved all those documents from the computer to our server. It took months. As fast as that Scansnap was, it was the bottleneck. It had a 50 sheet capacity and could scan 20 pages per minute.

Our helper could scan about 1,000 pages a day. That might seem like a lot, but a ream of paper is 500 sheets. She could scan two reams a day. That’s about a quarter of a carton, and we had an entire garage full of cartons.

Here’s a life tip: elder care is incredibly time consuming, emotionally draining, and expensive. Prepare for it as much as you can before you need it. Talk to your parents and kids. You’ll all be better prepared if you’re prepared.

Introducing Raven Pro

It was painful and expensive, but we did it. But, oh, if we’d had the Raven Pro, the job would have gone three times faster. Of course, back then the Raven Pro document scanner didn’t exist. But when Raven sent me one to review, I thought back on those days and realized just how big a help it would have been.

First, let’s just talk feeds and speeds. The Raven Pro has a 100 sheet capacity and can scan at a whopping 60 pages per minute. When you run pages through this thing, it’s hard to believe it’s even possible for the pages to move that fast. But not only is it scanning all 60 sheets (one per second), it’s OCRing them as well.

In 2013, I had to upload the documents we scanned to Evernote and then wait a week or so for Evernote to OCR them in the cloud, just so we could search them. With the Raven Pro, I could have stored the documents anywhere, and would have been able to do a search.

We could have scanned and OCR’d 3,000 documents a day — nearly a carton a day. Not only would the job have gone faster, but since we were paying for every hour of scanning time, the $699 Raven Pro would have saved us thousands of dollars.

There’s another big benefit of the Raven over the other excellent scanners I’ve used. It has a big (and by big, I mean the size of an iPad mini) display. You don’t have to dedicate a computer to scanning. You can label documents, examine them, and upload them, all from the scanner.

$649 at Amazon

In addition to scanning to Raven’s own cloud, you can scan directly to Google Drive, SharePoint, OneDrive, Dropbox, Evernote, and Box. You can scan and email, scan and fax, scan to a shared folder on your network, and scan to an FTP address — all from the screen on the Raven Pro.

Some issues

All is not ideal, even if we strongly recommend this device. The scanner mostly scans to the internet and does not buffer between scans. So once you do a scan, you have to wait for it to upload. I have an insanely fast fiber internet connection, so I didn’t notice any delay, but some users have found themselves tapping their fingers waiting for the upload to complete before going onto the next scan. That defeats the benefits of the ridiculously fast physical scanning time.