There are scanners designed to transfer your photo prints to JPEGs, scanners designed to convert your transparencies to TIFFs and scanners whose sole purpose in life is to help create electronic records of paper documents.

Xerox's DocuMate 262i falls firmly into the last of these categories. It can scan up to 38 pages per minute (ppm) single-sided or 76 sides per minute (spm) double-sided (duplex) and compile page images for electronic archival or convert them to editable text through OCR.

This is a sheet-feed scanner, which means it can't scan book or magazine pages, but it can scan all kinds of loose pages, including those on coloured papers, as long as the colour isn't too dark. Paper feeds from a tray at the rear to a similar one at the front, both of which fold out of the way when not scanning, to reduce the scanner's already small footprint.

Controls include buttons to switch from simplex to duplex scanning and to select from up to nine pre-set scan modes, with a single-character display to show the setting. There's a choice of output trays, depending on whether you want to use the front feed tray, which enables ID/credit card scanning. This feeder is spring-loaded and can get in the way when scanning A4 pages.

You get a hefty bundle of software with the DocuMate 262i. As well as full versions of Nuance PaperPort 11 for document management and OmniPage Pro 15 for OCR, there's a copy of Kofax VirtualReScan 4.2 and a 30-use demo of EMC Captiva QuickScan. VirtualReScan is specifically designed to clean up old or damaged pages, so everything going through the scanner doesn't have to be pristine and lovely.

It took 17 seconds to scan a 10-page bundle of mixed text pages, including invoices and some pages with business graphics, at 200dpi and in black and white. This equates to 35ppm, just a smidgeon off the rated speed. There's a 10 second warm-up for the lamp to add to this, if you haven't be using the scanner for a while, but it's still pretty quick. Scanning in duplex mode took 11 seconds for a 10-side job, giving 54spm. Both these speeds would be closer to Xerox's ratings on longer documents.

Raise the resolution to 300dpi, needed for OCR, and a 10-page document takes 25 seconds, or 24ppm. OCR works well, either directly from OmniPage or by dragging a document from PaperPort. There were few errors in the documents we scanned. Scan quality at 200dpi is also good enough for producing PDF archives directly, another PaperPort option.

The DocuMate 262i isn't cheap, but for a duplex, sheet-feed scanner with this speed, it's no more expensive than the competition. The quality of the supplied software raises the overall value of the product and if you regularly need to produce electronic backups of paper-based documents, its trouble-free operation makes it worth the price.