You can use the SmarThru 4 to scan a document and send it to an application to be manipulated; to a file to be saved; to an e-mail message; or to the OCR software. The OCR – optical character recognition – allows you to scan a newspaper article, for example, and convert it to a text document file (with an .rtf extension). We did a test with a magazine article and the result was pretty good, with only a paragraph out of place – something easily corrected by the word processor we send it to.

This all-in-one scans text and images at up to 4,800dpi, although at this resolution the PC slows down to a crawl (even the 1 GB RAM machine we used in this test). The scanning lid could’ve been more mobile to help press a thick book to be scanned or copied. After being lifted, the scanning lid stands only one inch above the scanner surface to allow you to lay flat a thin book. The SCX-4100 scans color documents at 3 ppm and black-and-white documents at 4 ppm.

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Figure 4: Scan test.

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Figure 5: Lid opened.