I received a few hundred (paper) pages of discovery, and wanted to send it off to the client for comment. (My discovery went to the other attorneys in the case as a PDF, with auto-Bates stamping and so forth. This was just a mass of stuff, difficult to control and even to prove that any given page was part of the discovery. No stamping or authentication at all. Am I missing something?)
I’m having scanner difficulties since I switched a computer to XP and the scanner with the ADF (Automatic Document Feed) just isn’t working with XP. And the manufacturer has no intention of upgrading drivers.) And my office can’t justified the high speed digital copier that could do the scanning / copying, anyhow.
So off to the nearest OfficeMax, and its CopyMax area. If I want to simply copy the mass (mess), $.09 per page and it is done in five minutes. If I want to scan, however, $8 for the first page and $2 per page thereafter. Understand, I didn’t care about format —- tiff, pdf, jpeg whatever would be fine.
Me: Surely there’s a mistake here. $8 for a single page?
Them: Yep!
Me: And $2 per page thereafter?
Them: Actually, it is $7.99 for the first page and $1.99 for each page thereafter. And, of course, $9.95 for the CD.
Me: But you’ll copy to paper for $.09 per page.
Them: That’s right.
Me: But you use the same copier / digital scanner. Don’t you?
Them: Actually, no. To copy we use these (pointing to a string of several large
size digital copiers) but to scan we use that one (pointing to a single machine which looked
pretty muich like the previously pointed to machines.).
Me: What’s the difference?
Them: The scanner is connected to a computer. When we scan we send the images to the computer
which is one reason that it is more expensive.
The computer seems to be an ordinary PC of some sort. And I can see it taking more (machine) time to scan than to copy, but human time ought to be no greater. Maybe they should reasonably charge a couple of bucks for the CD disc to store the images. But $8 for the first page and $2 per page thereafter?
Running the pages through the digital copier is, of course, the same for scanning or copying. And the high speed copiers, these days, are all digital. So I don’t really see the difference. I’m willing to pay a modest premium for the scanning and for the CD — the $8 for the first page makes some sense — but if the OfficeMax differential is justified, I’m obviously missing something.
It turns out, by the way, that Kinko’s — Fedex/Kinko’s, actually — which is double the distance from the office , doesn’t charge $8 for that first page. They just charge $.99 per page, and of course $9.95 for the disk, Maybe I’m wrong on the cost. If so, will someone please tell why? And if there someone who does scanning at a reasonable cost, I’d like to know that, too. (Again, I’m not interested in OCR, or any particular format. Anything standard will do.)
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