Wonderful product! (once you get it working ..... )
Written: May 06 '08 (Updated May 06 '08)
Product Rating:
Ease of Use:
Pros: Great for organizing receipts ... love the ability to split a receipt into multiple categories.
Cons: Calibration paper does not work and almost caused us to return the unit.
The Bottom Line: Great product for organizing all of your receipts! Possible issue with scanner calibration but easy to overcome once you are aware of it. Highly recommend with reservations!
snpdrgn's Full Review: Neat Receipts SCANALIZERâ„¢ Pass-Through Scanner
Background Info:
My husband and I saw this product at Costco and decided to research it before we spent the $150 on it. We thought it sounded great, but would it really work? We visited their website and it looked like it would be the savior of our yearly receipt hell that we suffered every year at tax time. Then I went to Epinions and saw the reviews and thought uh-oh ... the only good review was from over a year ago. Since Neat Receipts could potentially be a huge time savings for us, we decided to give it a try (with many reservations).
The installation:
We installed this product on a new HP m9177c with a 2.66GHz quad processor, 3Gb RAM and Vista (32-bit). We did encounter a slow install (I think it took around 15 minutes from start to finish). It did require us to shut down all anti-virus software and it did ask a couple of times if we wanted to look for an updated version. A new update of the installation software was available so I downloaded and ran it.
Once the software was installed, we then had to plug in the scanner and follow their instructions for calibrating it. You simply insert this special sheet that they give you and it magically calibrates the scanner (or so we thought).
Try #1, and #2, and #3:
We opened the software, and prepared to scan in our first receipt. It scanned it then popped up an error message saying that it was unable to read our receipt. Our crisp new receipt scanned in as a big grey blob with lines in it and absolutely nothing legible. So we tried again and again. Same result. They we tried a business card. Same thing. Then we tried recalibrating the scanner. Same result. We even tried scanning it wrong side up, just in case. No luck, just another error message.
Final Try:
Right about now, I was thinking that maybe we got a bad scanner like another reviewer thought. But then I figured that they can't all be bad and there might be something else going on. My husband noticed that when you do the re-calibration through the software that there was a last ditch option to just use the factory defaults and forego using the calibration sheets. We tried that and it actually worked! We spent the next couple of hours happily scanning in every receipt and business card that we could get our hands on.
It truly is a wonderful product, just don't use the calibration sheets!
I'm not sure how far-spread this issue is. It is not mentioned on their website (not much is).
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