Duel Stream Scanning – Have your cake and eat it too

The benefit of drop-out forms is that they are very accurate in data capture. The downside to drop-out forms is that after they are scanned they aren't much to look at. Companies want the best of both drop-out and black and white forms. They do this in various ways, the most common being to just deal with the images they have. Some will scan a document twice, that is very time consuming. Others will use an overlay utility that stamps the original form fields and labels back on an already processed drop-out image. These utilities are accurate but not as accurate as the original and often result in lines stamped on text. The best solution for getting a form scanned efficiently that is both optimum for data capture and viewing is to use duel stream scanning.

Duel stream scanning is usually a feature in the higher end scanners. The technology is slowly moving down to the work group and desktop scanners. What the feature allows for is a single scan that produces both a drop-out and black and white image. The scan speed is the same scan speed as if you were scanning in color. When configured the drop-out image goes one path and the black and white image another. By doing so a company can use the drop-out image only for data capture, and the black and white image will marry with the data capture results in the database or file system.

The difference in data capture accuracy between a drop-out form and a black and white scanned form is on average 15% more accurate often much higher. The reason for this is the OCR in data capture does not get interfered with form lines being printed on or too close to text. Additionally the logic to locate fields can be simplified as field labels are often small font and hard to detect.

It's simple and has the greatest accuracy of any solution, duel stream is a great tool.