My latest HP was an HP8500 multipurpose that I bought specifically to get the automatic document feeder. We moved a little over a year ago and don't have room for all the paper, so I've been going through the old stuff (mostly 50 years of engineering papers) and saving digital copies of what might be worth keeping - for sentimental reasons(?).

A "feature" was that the ADF advertised the ability to scan both sides of a stack of pages. It was somewhat disappointing to find that scanning 2-sided took 3 times as long as scanning 1-sided, and the ADF invariably jammed on 2-sided scans of anything less than 8" x 10" pages (not as advertised). A jam also invariably "completely destroyed" the original, and clearing a jam required exotic tools and lots of "careful but forceful" yanking and tearing.

It was replaced once under warranty, but the scan bar failed a couple of weeks ago, and it's not worth fixing with no local support. The printer seems to be possibly the best HP inkjet we've had, and is extremely economical on ink. I'd give a qualified recommendation for the HP8500 printer for a small business - without the ADF, but it's a bit more machine than most individuals would find useful. Ink costs - with color - are quite comparable to B/W laser so it might be a good choice for someone who produces a newsletter with reasonable numbers of copies.

I did manage to get about 8,000 pages through the scanner before it died, although it took about 4 months to do it.

Since the HP wouldn't scan 2-sided on smaller pages, I figured out that if I scanned to JPG instead of directly to PDF I got a separate jpg file for each page. Scan one side, batch file to renumber odd. Scan second side and renumber to even, and drag the files onto my PDF converter to make documents out of it all.

I'm currently trying out a new Epson GT-S50, that promises to be a lot more efficient. It scans only one-sided, but I already had my batch files set up to flip the pages into order; and it runs around 17 pages per minute through the ADF instead of half-a-page for minute for the HP. (Although associated software on both take a surprisingly long time to "process" the output.)

Thus far the Epson has "wrinkled" two pages (out of about 3,000 - in less than 2 weeks) and the entire machine "opens up" so that jams just fall out; and the couple that got wrinkled ran through faultlessly on the second try.

The Epson doesn't include a flat bed, but I have two others (working) when that's needed.

Most of what I've been scanning recently gets shredded. My only complaint about my latest shredder is that the bin's too small, but it's not too much problem to dump it into a 36 gallon trash bin as needed. (Two previous shredders that wore out on me were easily adapted to drop directly into the trash barrel, but that was before I started my current archiving project.)

So far I'm on barrel 25 of shreds, almost full, (750 gallons?) since about mid October. Unfortunately my area has no place to recycle shredded paper.

I expect to be done with my "archiving" by about 2014, and then I'll get back to a better photo scanner.

John