NeatReceipts Professional Scanner

I bought the NeatReceipts scanner a couple of weeks ago at Staples; you can also get it from Amazon and a bunch of other places; it's around $200. My flatbed had taken a dive and I needed to scan some stuff, but my wife was planning to get a new flatbed for upstairs so I figured I didn't need a huge one.

The NeatReceipts is pretty sweet; it's tiny and comes with a little stand so it just sits at the back of my desk out of the way unless I need it. The only cable is a standard USB; it gets its power from that as well. At roughly 2" x 2" x 12", it's a nice package. Documents are pulled through the unit, so they have to be separate pages --- you can't scan a page out of a book, for example.

The receipt and business card scanning software is technically quite impressive. Stick in just about any receipt or business card and it will auto-recognize most fields, down to tax and total, cell vs. office phones, and so on. It's quite a trick. However, integration with other apps like Outlook or Quicken is kind of awkward. It works, it just takes a bunch of steps to keep things in sync.

One big issue: installing was a hassle on Windows XP SP2; it kept hanging and required an email to their customer support. On the upside, I got a response over the weekend and it worked (use task manager to kill the "setupre" process when it hangs).

In any case, there it sits on my desk now and I've used it quite a few times. For my light, business-related scanning needs it's a perfect fit, and once in awhile the specialized software comes in handy as well. Definitely a good purchase in my book.