Xerox DocuMate 5445 review

Dave Mitchell Read more September 19, 2014

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£629

Price when reviewed

Xerox’s compact DocuMate 5445 sheet-fed scanner combines fast duplex speeds with an affordable price. It has a claimed speed of 45ppm at 200dpi for both mono and colour pages, and can handle a variety of paper thicknesses.

The DM5445 looks identical to Panasonic’s KV-S1046C, but although the latter is cheaper, it can’t match Xerox for software. The DM5445’s bundle includes Nuance PaperPort for document and image management, and OmniPage and its OCR tools, plus Converter Pro for creating PDFs from other file formats.

Xerox’s OneTouch utility links the scanner’s Function button to up to nine actions. Destinations include many cloud services, although you need a premium Google Drive account to scan to this service.

Speed is excellent: a 45-page sheaf of bank statements scanned at 45ppm using the 200dpi mono single-side profile. The DM5445 retained this speed at 300dpi, while a 600dpi profile returned 29ppm. Both simplex and duplex colour scans at 200dpi returned 45ppm, which dropped to 40ppm at 300dpi and 9ppm at 600dpi.

The Xerox happily scanned embossed credit and ID cards, flimsy courier tear-offs, till receipts, A4 forms and photos. Double-feed detection worked well: the scanner stopped as soon as it spotted a potential jam.
Quality is fine for document archiving. Scanned photos at 600dpi were sharp, with good detail and contrast. The Acuity plugin’s anti-skew feature performed well, although its post-processing left a smear on some documents.

The Xerox DocuMate 5445 combines fast scans with good output quality and intuitive operation. The Panasonic KV-S1046C is £100 cheaper, but if you want decent document-management software, the Xerox is the better bet.