The OneTouch is actually three machines in one. It has a row of buttons on the front of the unit. Press one and the document is sent to the scanner software, press another and your scanner sends the output to the printer, another button sends the image to your fax software. The buttons are customizable. Press any of them, hold it down and a window appears with various options for image handling, what program to send the image to, etc. A software version of the button bar is also available on the Windows 95/98 task bar.

One of the most impressive things about the OneTouch is Visioneer's own OCR software. It has an amazing accuracy rate, making it a serious tool for translating print documents into machine-readable ones. I tried scanning a number of text docs with various levels of legibility. Most of them showed a very high OCR rate. I tried a fuzzy dot matrix printout from a pharmacy prescription and it didn't miss a letter. Even the tiny 6-point type was read accurately. A page from the new Dogz 3 virtual pet manual (which had lots of graphics on the page) didn't fare quite as well. It interpreted "Dogz" as "Dojz" and got four other words wrong. Still, this isn't too shabby. It seems to consistently mistake "o" for "e" (and vice versa) on anything other than a straight-forward document. If you do a lot of OCR and need the highest-possible accuracy rate, Visioneer sells OCRPro 100 (US$50) which they claim has a 98% accuracy rate.

The scanning quality is quite good -- not the best I've seen -- but good enough for most applications. The scanner is 36-bit color with an optical scanning resolution of 600 x 1200 dpi. There are not as many image-handling options as on higher-end machines. Those familiar with other Visioneer products know how the excellent PaperPort desktop works. It's a alternate graphical desktop that you enter each time you scan something. From here you can tweak your images, annotate and draw on them, store them in special PaperPort folders, or move them into your regular desktop folders. PictureWorks PhotoEnhancer software is also included for further image manipulation.

The OneTouch is a perfect choice for home and small office users. You can have it out of the box and scanning images inside of three minutes. It's always refreshing to encounter technology that's this easy, versatile and most of all, inexpensive.

- Gareth Branwyn [11/6/98]

Other scanners reviewed on Street Tech:

• PaperPort Strobe
• ImageWave
• TotalScan