Kodak's latest Scanmate i1120 scanner bundle (see my review, which will posted on this site soon) is a worthy rival to Fujitsu's nifty little Scansnap, though I did hit a slight hiccup with the Vista driver. Both devices, despite their small size, are designed to cope with the document processing of a small office.

They are also good for a task many people face, or would face if they got round to it: reducing stacks of old paper to a couple of CDs. Newspaper and magazine articles are probably better photographed than scanned; you can even translate the results into text using the latest versions of leading OCR packages.

I set the Scanmate a real-life task of digitising a load of typewritten A4 manuscripts and photocopies, dating from the days before word-processors. Some of the pages had heavy handwritten annotations and alterations and Omnipage, one of the packages bundled with the Scanmate, OCR-red them very well – though, inevitably, not perfectly.

Some of the manuscripts were literally cut-and-paste jobs. In pre-computer days, of course, this was the way of editing: you typed or wrote out an alteration, cut it to shape, and pasted it over the original. It struck me that this connotation is probably completely lost on younger computer users when they use the term.

In the same way nautical terms like fathoming and plumbing have taken on their metaphorical meaning, and are rarely used in their original sense. The first person who said 'I can't fathom it' must have been a sailor who threw a plumb line over the side of the ship and couldn't touch bottom. A wonderful image has been lost.

Another thing I noticed going through the typescripts was that they used fractions, such as 1½ miles. Fractions have virtually disappeared in the computer age and you can see why: it has just taken me a couple of minutes in Word to find the '½' symbol. Far easier to write 1.5 miles. Old typewriters of course had keys for common fractions.

Scanners like the Scanmate and Scansnap are expensive compared with a cheapo flatbed. But considering the time they can save, and the fact that with a bit of they can clear a room of paper, they are worth it.