As you can see, the NeatDesk scanner ($385, left) is significantly larger than the NeatReceipts scanner ($185, right). It's about the same size as the ScanSnap S1500M ($419), and takes up the same amount of desktop space. It's an attractive appliance, and brings to mind the shiny white plastic appliances in Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey.

I already had installed the NeatWorks software on my Mac in order to evaluate the NeatReceipts scanner, and because NeatDesk uses the same software, all I had to do to start scanning was plug in the AC power adapter and the USB cable (both included) and stick some sheets of paper into the input tray. The input tray has three feeder slots for different sized pieces of paper, and it does a terrific job of aligning the sheets of paper when they go through the machine. This is an improvement over the ScanSnap, which will occasionally grab a sheet of paper incorrectly and pull it through at an angle. With the three-slot input tray, I was able to insert full-size pages, receipts, and business cards and scan them all at the same time without jamming. The scanner can handle up to fifteen cards, fifteen receipts and fifteen full-size pages.

I tested the scanner with a full load of 50 sheets of paper, set for double-sided scanning, and it processed them them in 3 minutes, 40 seconds. It would have been faster, but after it had whipped through the first four sheets, there was a considerable pause between each of the next 46 sheets of paper. The ScanSnap S1500M processed the same 50 sheets in 2 minutes, 19 seconds. Not only was the NeatDesk slower than the ScanSnap, it was also slightly noisier. Another distracting NeatDesk behavior is the way the motor continues to runs for a couple of seconds after it has processed all the sheets of paper. I assume this is to make sure it hasn't left any unscanned pages in the input tray.

I also witnessed the NeatDesk allow two sheets of paper to go through the scanner at the same time, which means one of the documents went through unscanned. This has never happened to me with the ScanSnap S1500M. That's because the ScanSnap has an ultrasonic sensor that detects when two sheets of paper have stuck together. For my purposes (becoming paper free) I need a scanner I can trust to scan each document I give it, because when I'm done scanning a pile of documents, I send them to the shredder and they are gone for good.

After the pages are analyzed, there's quite a long wait for them to be analyzed by NeatWork's optical character recognition software. And from my experience, the software doesn't do a great job of OCRing the text. It does a better job if you click the "reanalyze" button, but that takes more time. It also fails to accurately and consistently enter the OCRed text into the proper fields in Neatwork's database form. I greatly prefer my ScanSnap/Evernote method. I scan in documents as fast as the ScanSnap can take them, and Evernote works in the background, performing high-quality OCR so I can find scanned records by entering keywords in Evernote's search bar. The NeatWorks software allows you to scan new documents while it's processing the previously scanned ones, but the overall experience feels more sluggish with NeatWorks than it does with Evernote.

That said, there is one thing I like about NeatWorks that Evernote can't do: the ability to edit your scanned documents. You can delete blank pages and rotate pages that are upside down using NeatWorks. With Evernote, you have to locate the file and use an image editor utility to rotate the pages.

While I never once experienced a paper jam or misaligned document with the NeatDesk scanner, my first choice for a paperless office remains the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M. It's slightly more expensive than the the NeatDesk, but its speed, quiet operation, stuck-together-sheet detection, and integration with Evernote make it the clear winner.

Mark Frauenfelder – Editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular Boing Boing weblog, Mark was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and is the founding editor of Wired Online.