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Panasonic KV-S5076H


The Panasonic KV-S5076H is a fast, feature-rich departmental document scanner that can scan at up to tabloid size. Editor Rating: Excellent (4.5) May 20, 2014 US Street Price$6195.00
May 20, 2014 Tony Hoffman The Panasonic KV-S5076H ($6,195 list)—one of two new departmental document scanners (along with the Panasonic KV-S5046H) the company recently introduced—is an impressive beast. It's able to scan massive volumes of documents at up to tabloid size at breakneck speed, and loses little time in the OCR phase when saving to searchable PDF format. It has some useful paper feeding and image enhancement features. Not only is this scanner well worth its admittedly hefty price—retailers are selling it for around $4,000—it's a clear pick for Editors' Choice.

At 13.4 by 18.5 by 17.5 inches (HWD), it is a sizable unit, but not so large that a department should have any trouble finding a place for it. It weighs 42 pounds. As is typical of document scanners, the KV-S5076H scans at up to 600 ppi. Its automatic document feeder (ADF) can fit up to 300 sheets of paper at up to tabloid (11- by 17-inch) size; it supports the scanning of much longer banners, which the software splits into separate pages should they exceed 100 inches in length. It has a massive maximum daily duty cycle of up to 35,000 pages. The KV-S5076H supports one-touch scanning to up to 100 destinations that can be programmed to appear on the scanner's LED screen. 
Panasonic also offers a version of the KV-S5076H that adds Kofax VRS (virtual rescan) Elite software, the KV-S5076H-V ($6,595 list).

Preview and Warning Functions
The KV-S5076H has several useful preview functions that can improve document quality and correct mistakes. Auto Preview automatically creates nine versions of a scanned document and displays them as thumbnails. The user can select the most suitable image, and then make further adjustments if needed. Auto Rescan lets you adjust the scanned image quality without rescanning the original document. If there is a problem with a scanned image, the user will be notified with one of several warning functions, and the problem will be flagged with an icon. It can also detect pages with color among what's primarily a monochrome document and flag them for special treatment.

Another useful feature is hardware image processing, in which some traditionally software-based functions are instead controlled by hardware. This lets, for example, the scanner to offer the same speed rating whether you're scanning at 200 or 300 dpi resolution.

This scanner has several features to minimize paper jams and improve scan quality. Toughfeed includes ultrasonic double-feed detection, intelligent feed control, and high-quality feed rollers. With paper ejection control, the paper exit roller reduces the speed of the paper being ejected and aligns the paper to prevent paper jams or the loss of originals.

Automatic glass cleaning helps maintain image quality, and the KV-S5076H's self-cleaning ionizer produces negative ions that keep paper dust suspended for easier removal.

Physical paper skewing is prevented by the integrated mechanical de-skew system. Even when largely skewed documents are fed into the scanner, a mechanical de-skew system physically adjusts the paper before each page is scanned. It was impressive to watch precisely aligned pages appear in preview, while with most scanners the skewing is obvious, even after you've carefully squared off each page.

Connectivity is via USB, including USB 3.0, it and the Panasonic KV-S5046H are the first scanners I've tested to support that standard. With the optional Panasonic KV-SS1100 network appliance, the scanner can be added to a wired or wireless network.

As is true of many departmental document scanners, the KV-S5076H ships with minimal software, as IT departments generally want to integrate the scanner with their preferred document management solutions. Software includes Panasonic Image Capture Plus utility, which lets you scan and save documents to different formats, as well as Twain and ISIS drivers, which enable you to initiate scans from nearly any Windows program with a scan command.

Scanning Speed
In a nutshell, the KV-S5076H has blistering fast raw scanning speed, scans nearly as fast in duplex (two-sided) mode as in simplex (one-sided), and only lost a small amount of time in the OCR stage when I saved the scans to searchable PDF, which for many businesses is the desired format for document management. Its lag time before each scan (while the ADF is positioned) is on the long side; this will be less of an issue when the scanner is used for the high-volume jobs for which it's designed rather than for smaller ones.

The KV-S5076H is rated at up to 100 pages per minute (ppm) for simplex (one-sided) scanning and 200 images per minute (ipm) for duplex (two-sided) scanning, where each side of a page is considered one image. That rating is for when the paper is placed in the ADF in landscape mode; as a tabloid scanner, the maximum paper width is 11.7 inches, so it can accept letter-sized paper in either landscape or portrait orientation. The scanner has a lower rating (80 ppm/160 ipm) for scanning in portrait orientation, so I tested it in the faster landscape mode. Based purely on raw scanning speed (the time actually spent scanning, which is what the rated speeds are based on), it matched its rated speed for simplex scanning (100 ppm), and fell a little short in duplex, turning in a still blistering 173.4 ipm.

We do our official timings from when we press the scan command to the time the scanned file is saved. (With the KV-S5076H it's a two-step process: the scan, followed by the save. I timed the two steps separately, and then added the times to get the total scan time.) When so timed, it turned in average speeds of 57.6 ppm and 106 ipm for simplex and duplex scanning, respectively.

That drop-off in speed was due to extra time after and, especially, before each scan. The one downside of the voluminous ADF is that before each scan begins it has to reposition itself, a process that consistently took seven seconds. An additional few seconds were spent after each scan, in processing and saving the document to image PDF format. The larger the average number of pages in your scans, the less of an effect the lag time before each scan will have on your scanning speed.

The KV-S5076H scanned and saved our 25-page/50-image test file to 300-ppi searchable PDF in a zippy 37 seconds, just 9 seconds longer than it took to scan it to image PDF.

The scanner turned in slightly faster speeds than the KV-S5046H, rated at 80 ppm/160 ipm for simplex and duplex scanning in landscape mode, which I timed at 51.7 ppm and 100 ipm, respectively. Based on actual scanning time, the KV-S5046H effectively matched its rated speeds for both simplex and duplex scanning, and was nearly as fast as the KV-S5076H when scanning to searchable PDF (39 seconds).

Both the KV-S5076H and Panasonic KV-S5046H are worthy replacements for the Panasonic KV-S5055C, which the company will be phasing out. They take the best of the latter scanner and add to it. They're faster (especially in scanning to searchable PDF), have larger ADFs and duty cycles, and add a slew of features such as auto-preview and auto-rescan. But the Panasonic KV-S5076H adds the most—it is slightly faster, is built for heavier-duty scanning, has an even larger feature set, including the ability to scan from up to 100 user-programmable scan profiles. For businesses that need a high-performance departmental document scanner, it is well worth its considerable cost, and it's a clear pick for Editors' Choice.

