This a very small, lightweight, scanner. Its physical dimensions are about the same as one of those small folding umbrellas, and its weight is not much more than theirs.

It is very good at scanning black-and-white text, and not very good at scanning grey and coloured images. For best results these should be scanned separately, on a flat-bed scanner.

The Visioneer Duplex Scanner is connected by USB cable, and it can draw its power from the USB, if you find it necessary (ie no mains). This makes it very portable, and you could use it in the car if you wanted to.

There is one feature that may initially cause a problem. It needs to be "calibrated", whatever that may mean. Apparently there is a bug in its firmware that prevents this process from working. After numerous attempts I rang the UK office of Visioneer, and was sent a file to download and run. This wrote into the scanner's data files on my computer the information that it would have gained from the calibration. I expect this glitch has caused a lot of people to tear their hair out about this scanner.

The next thing is also important. You have to clean the scanner every 100 scans, or so. This is done by passing a special sheet of material as long as the scanner's maw is wide, through the scanner. To do this navigate to the PC's control panel, with the Visioneer connected; you will see an entry for it. Right-click on that entry, which will bring up a list. Click on Properties, and thence on the Device Settings tab. Set the Paper Pickup Delay to Moderate, if you haven't done so previously, and finally click on Clean. It will then request that you insert the cleaning material. When it has done with it the material will be ejected, and the message on the screen will say "Success". However it will immediately go on to request another pass of the cleaning material, and when you don't comply it will complain that cleaning was a failure. Ignore all that.

To set it up for scanning, just press the oval unmarked button at the right-hand end of the scanner, which will cause a small 5-line image to rise up on the lower right part of the computer screen. Right click on the purple-coloured area of this image, called "Paper In".

Click first on "Transfer to Storage", because this what you want to do. You want to put your images somewhere where Irfanview can be used to deal with them.

Then click on "New Configuration". For straightforward black-and-white scans set "black-and-white", 300 dpi, brightness 80. Then click on "Page Settings", "duplex", "custom" and tell it the size of your scans. Since I have discovered that the best scanning comes if you put the page in sideways, rather than top first, you need to give it the page dimensions so that what you call the height is entered as the width, and vice-versa. Enter the "width" as the exact length top-to-bottom of your page. On the other hand for the "height" enter the length of your pages left to right plus an inch, or a couple of centimetres. For the "Storage Options" tab, browse to where you want the scans to be placed, and also click "All documents are in the root". Then, as ever, click on "Apply", which will bring you back to the front screen of the settings. Again click on "Apply" and you are ready to proceed.

Set the guides on the scanner's maw so that they are just a little bigger than the page. Push the page in, and it will be gripped by some mechanism inside the scanner, and drawn through. At the same time an image on the PC's screen will show you exactly what has been captured. If there is any distortion in the image simply pass that page through again. Distortion can occur if the picking-up was uneven, thus changing the direction of the page as it passes through, or of it was delayed. There may also be distortion if the last part of the page to pass through was a rather narrow margin. I tell you how to deal with this situation, below.

During the scanning of a book you might think of cleaning the scanner again. This will not take long and might well improve the scans you get, but there's no way of telling that. After a couple of hundred pages the automatic picking-up of the page as you insert it seems to be turned off somehow, and I think this might be an indication that cleaning is required. It doesn't take long, so it won't slow you up too much if you do it. I reckon that you can scan 100 pages every 20 minutes.

If the page is not picked up automatically just click on the little purple square "Paper In" within that image on the lower right of your computer screen, and when that page is done do the cleaning process, before carrying on with the next page.

The pages go in from the front to the back of the book, even-numbered pages uppermost. In most cases you should feed the outer edge of the page in first, so that the gutter-edge goes in last. If however there was not much inner margin on the pages of the book, then you should reverse this: even-numbered pages still uppermost, but the pages will be proffered the other way round.

When you have finished the book have a look at the scans, using Irfanview. Do this also just after you have started, to check that the brightness setting is correct.

With regard to where to set up your storage folder, I have a folder for each author, then a sub-folder of that one for each of the author's books. Within the book's folder I set up three sub-folders, namely "original", "big" and "cropped". All the scans go into "original". I then use Irfanview to rotate the scan-images and put them into "big". I go through the images deleting any that had to be redone because of distorted images. When all this is done, and I am sure there are the right number of scans I use the "renaming" feature of Irfanview to give each scan a name associated with the book and its page number. The final cleaning up of the images can now be done with some of my own software, which I have already put into the public domain, but if anyone would like more guidance about this I will gladly give it.

Finally I use SkanKromsator to straighten and crop the images, putting its output into "cropped". A little more simple work with Irfanview, and we have all the pages the same size and in the right order. This can be used to create a nice pdf of the book, which will be used for referring to when editing the book.

And then also we create a subfolder of "cropped", in which we process each page with more of my software to remove the page headers, and possibly the page numbers from the bottom of the page. This gives us a file of pages, which can be passed through Abbyy FineReader -- but that's another story.