Get both documents and photos in digital form
Xerox has a close relationship with Visioneer, a company that has long been know for its range of scanners, and the 7600 is a flatbed in this tradition, made by the big V and sold by the bigger X.
Depending on the publicity you read, this is an ideal photo scanner or a mobile scanner, which suggests that Xerox isn’t completely sure where it belongs.
The 7600 is a USB scanner, meaning it needs no other cable than the USB one, as it draws all its power from the USB socket. This makes it easy to set up and neat to have on your desk, except that, inexplicably, the cable plugs in near the front of its right side, rather than at the back.
At front of the lid is a set of five buttons, labelled e-mail, copy, scan, archive and photo, on the main deck of the scanner. These tie into applications of your choosing, so it's possible to easily select a destination for each scan.
Xerox implies the 7600 is ideal for scanning photos, but in reality its maximum optical resolution of 1,200dpi and lack of a top light for scanning transparencies mean it’s no better than most all-in-ones or entry-level flat-bed scanners. In fact, in our tests, even scans of photo prints came through with a slight blue cast, which needed to be removed in software.
That software comprises Arcsoft’s Scrapbook Suite, which includes Photoimpression 5 for photo editing, and Nuance’s Paperport 11 SE, for optical character recognition (OCR). While neither of these applications are in their latest versions, both are very competent and worth having.
Scan speed is reasonable for a scanner in this price bracket, but at around 20 seconds for a 300dpi page – the minimum for OCR – and 50 seconds for a 600dpi photo scan, it’s not going to break any records. It’s a quiet device, though, and working with an inkjet or laser printer it can make a useful copier, in addition to its core function of scanning.
