This Week in Imaging: Document Scanning Is the New Office Workhorse

When it comes to reproducing and sharing documents, back in the day, the copier was the key office device. (Before that, it was probably the ability of typewriters, using special paper, to make multiple copiers. Before that, it was probably the Gutenberg Press.)

The next key device became the office printer. At that point, analog copiers became digital so that they could be connected to office PCs and print documents created with PCs. When those documents needed to be shared outside of the office, instead of mailing them, they could be printed and then faxed, so fax was added, and we had the modern office MFP.

One step was still missing though – how to get paper documents back into digital form so they could be stored locally and processed? The answer was of course scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) software, so documents could be converted into “text-editable” format and changed as needed. This wasn’t always desirable however as in the case of legal contracts, so that also gave rise to a new digital document capability, the Portable Document format (PDF) that could be used to prevent users from changing documents.

Today, we’re at the step where documents are scanned, converted into digital format, and then stored in cloud-based document repositories such as Microsoft OneDrive. The advantage of this is that these documents can be accessed anywhere (with the proper credentials) with an Internet connection, allowing users to work from anywhere – something that particularly came in handy when offices around the world were shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic.

That ability to access documents with just an Internet connection and credentials meant a lot of paper-based documents were abandoned. But the use of paper is still huge. According to Statista, in the U.S., paper use has declined about 38 percent since 2000. However, although paper use continues to decline, in 2023, the U.S. consumed approximately 58.3 million metric tons of paper. Many of those paper documents will of course need to be stored and/or shared with others, and to get them there will require document scanning, which is now becoming the workhorse of the document-imaging industry.

This week we saw one company, Ricoh, acknowledge this with the introduction of new A3 MFPs enhanced with new document-scanning technology developed by PFU (Ricoh obtained PFU, which was previously Fujitsu’s document-scanner company in 2023). As document scanning becomes increasingly important, we can likely expect document-imaging companies to continue to enhance it not only with OCR and automatic PDFs, but with greater reliability, automatic document extraction, and automatic document routing, including to the cloud, with many deploying AI to make these processes more efficient.

This Week in Imaging

Acquisitions

HP to Purchase Parts of AI Firm for $116 Million

Sharp Acquires AllStar Business Machines

Financial News

Toshiba Reports Much Improved Financial Results

Office Printers and MFPs

Ricoh Launches New IM A3 Color MFPs with PFU Scanner Technology

New Sharp Desktop A4 Models with Enterprise-Level Features

Document Scanning

Epson Offering Document-Scanner and Cloud-Based Management Software Bundle

Other News

Sharp Awarded U.S., Canadian Contracts for MFPs, Printers, and Displays