Visioneer Patriot H60

Visioneer Patriot H60

Editor Rating: Excellent (4.5)
Visioneer Patriot H60
  • Pros

    • Exceptional optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy.
    • Feature-rich, easy-to-deploy software.
    • Very fast scanning and saving to PDF.
    • 10,000-page daily duty cycle.
  • Cons

    • Would be more competitive at a lower price.
  • Bottom Line

    The Visioneer Patriot H60 scans quickly and accurately, and it has a huge daily duty cycle and a comprehensive software bundle.

With speed ratings similar to the HP ScanJet Enterprise Flow 7000 s3 Sheet-Feed Scanner, a top pick, the Visioneer Patriot H60 ($1,095) scans fast and accurately, and it comes with a significantly higher daily duty cycle. It's also one of the fastest scanners in this class that PCMag has reviewed recently, especially when saving to searchable PDF, but it costs $200 more than the HP model. It comes with an impressive software bundle that includes Visioneer's easy-to-use OneTouch scanning interface utility, as well as state-of-the-art optical character recognition (OCR) and document-management programs. In most ways, it outpaces the HP ScanJet 7000, more than enough to compensate for the higher price, making it our Editors' Choice as a moderate-to-high-volume document scanner for small and medium-size offices and workgroups.

Built to Perform

It's not often that we see a sheet-feed document scanner in this price range with the H60's daily duty cycle of 10,000 scans. While the HP ScanJet 7000's speed rating is slightly higher than that of the H60, its duty cycle is 2,500 scans lower, and two other comparably priced models, the Editors' Choice Epson Workforce DS-860 and the Canon imageFormula DR-M160II, have even lower duty cycles. In addition, the H60's ADF holds up to 120 sheets, whereas the HP ScanJet 7000's and Epson DS-860's ADFs handle 40 sheets less, and the Canon DR-M160II's ADF is only half the size of the Visioneer model.

Housed in a black chassis with an off-white front panel, the H60 measures 9.4 by 12.5 by 26.8 inches (HWD) with its trays open and weighs 9.2 pounds, making it a little bigger and slightly heavier than the competing models. Like most sheet-feed document scanners, it should sit comfortably on an average-size desktop, and when folded up and out of service, it takes up very little space.

Aside from its color scheme, the H60 looks very much like the Xerox DocuMate 6440—not a coincidence, given that Visioneer makes Xerox-brand scanners. Both machines have similar control panels, comprised of a monochrome LED for selecting workflow profiles, combined with Up and Down buttons (for scrolling through profiles). There are also buttons for Simplex (for initiating one-sided scans), Duplex (for starting two-sided scans), and power. The only real difference is that the H60's display is longer, and it shows profile numbers and names, whereas the Xerox 6440 shows only profile numbers. Both models allow you to choose profiles and initiate them from either the control panel or Visioneer's OneTouch software.

Intuitive, Highly Capable Software

In addition to the TWAIN, ISIS, and WIA drivers that come with most document scanners, the H60 ships with the same software bundle that comes with the Xerox 6440. The bundle includes: Visioneer OneTouch with Acuity, a simple-to-use, but robust, scanning interface with Visioneer Acuity for increased accuracy; Nuance PaperPort, a popular document-management program; Nuance OmniPage Ultimate, a highly capable OCR program; and Nuance Power PDF for editing and creating Adobe Acrobat portable document files (PDFs). In addition, the H60 is Kofax VRS compatible, though the Kofax software is not included.

Visioneer Patriot H60

Visioneer Acuity is a utility similar to Kofax VRS in that it enhances poor scans for greater OCR accuracy. OneTouch is the primary scanning interface. It consists of a small row of buttons that you launch from your PC's system tray. There are several predefined buttons for scanning to Microsoft Word, searchable PDF, email, and so on, that you can edit and/or rename, or you can create your own—all from a robust backend that you activate by right-clicking the OneTouch interface. This is also the software that the scanner interfaces with to download profiles. This allows you to provide your users with easy-to-use one-click (or -touch) workflow profiles containing resolution, one- or two-sided scanning, destination, and other important configuration options.

Raw Speed, Smooth Follow Through

When it comes to the actual physical scanning of pages, the H60 is fast. We tested with OneTouch at its default 300dpi over USB 3.0 from our standard Intel Core i5 PC running Windows 10 Professional. Without the lag time (the time between when the last page is scanned and when the accompanying software subsequently saves the scan to a usable format), it scanned our test documents at 69 pages per minute (ppm) in simplex mode and 136.4 images per minute (ipm) in duplex mode, where each page side constitutes an image.

What's more important, though, is how fast the scanner scans and then saves scans to a file, which for our testing purposes is either image or searchable PDF. The H60 scanned our 25-page, one-sided test document to image PDF at 66.6ppm, and our two-sided test document at 130.4ipm. That is actually faster than the HP ScanJet 7000's 60ppm and 111ipm, but slower than the Epson DS-860's 73ppm and 146ipm. The Canon imageFormula DR-M160II came in significantly slower than the H60.

Visioneer Patriot H60

Many scanners take a substantial hit when scanning to searchable PDF, as does the H60. Even so, it's still faster than most competitors. It scanned and saved our 25-sheet (50-page) test document in 28 seconds, which is 17 seconds quicker than the HP ScanJet 7000 and 5 seconds faster than the Canon DR-M106II. Canon document scanners are usually faster at saving to searchable PDF than their competitors.

One thing I did notice with the H60 is that it seems to scan faster than the accompanying OneTouch software can keep up with. During each searchable PDF scan job, the scanner stopped for a few seconds to allow time for the software's buffer to catch up. This suggests that with a faster computer, the H60's searchable-PDF scores could have been even higher.

Respectable Accuracy

The H60 has some formidable competition in both the HP ScanJet 7000 and the Epson DS-860, as well as the Canon DR-M160II and the Brother PDS-5000 and PDS-6000–all fast, high-volume sheet-feed document scanners. Like the HP ScanJet 7000 and the Epson DS-860, the H60 scanned and converted our Arial and Times New Roman test pages without errors down to 6-point font sizes, which is above average for this class of scanner.

Only the Canon DR-160II, at 5 points for both fonts without mistakes, did better; the two Brother models' scores, at 8 points for both fonts, were closer to average. In other words, the H60's OCR accuracy should be more than accurate for most types of business document scanning.

A Good Choice

We found a lot to like about the Visioneer Patriot H60. It's reasonably fast and scans quite well. We scanned hundreds of pages without a single jam or other mishap, and the OneTouch software is both easy to use for the end user, and robust and feature-rich for the IT manager on the backend. It's the only scanner we know of in this price range with a 10,000-scan duty cycle—Visioneer apparently has a lot of faith in its construction, and judging from what we saw, so do we. If you need to scan between 7,500 and 10,000 pages each day, warranty-wise, you should probably choose the H60, but if you plan to scan fewer than 7,500 pages a day, the HP ScanJet 7000 costs less, but then it's also slower than the H60.

The Canon DR-M106II is more accurate, if ultimate accuracy, especially when scanning smaller fonts, is what you're looking for. Yes, the H60 runs in formidable circles, against some strong competitors, and, compared with most of them—except the HP ScanJet 7000—it's similarly priced, making it our favorite solution for medium-to-heavy volume document scanning in small and moderate-size offices and workgroups.