Xerox to ‘fix’ scanners

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Hyderabad: On the scale of things too horrible to imagine, “document-altering scanner” is right up there. Last week, Xerox acknowledged that some of its scanners can, with certain settings, change the numbers in scanned documents. However, the company is working on a fix for the problem, which sources said “happens in rare cases.”
The problem with the Xerox WorkCentre, models 7535 and 7556, which allow office workers to scan, print, fax, copy and email documents from the same machine, came to light when David Kriesel, a German computer scientist, scanned a construction plan on the machine and noticed that the document that came out was not identical to the one that was inserted or went in.
Numbers for some room measurements had changed. Mr Kriesel alerted Xerox and wrote about the problem on his blog.
Speaking to this correspondent after the launch of multi-function printers , sources said, “Let me put this in perspective, that this is an anomaly and not a technical glitch. It is experienced by a few users when using the ‘scan to file’ function, but only if they have modified the filecompression settings. In simple words, this anomaly takes place only when a user changes the default settings of the scanners.”  The company said that some users use extra compression because they have network bandwidth limitations or their files are exceptionally large.
Xerox’s principal engineer, Francis Tse, had said that the company was taking the issue ‘very seriously’.
Speaking about the fix for the anomaly in WorkCentre models 7535 and 7556, sources added that the company is developing a “software patch”.The United States- based company recommends the use of the factory defaults with a quality level set to ‘higher’ and that it is using the feedback it is getting from customers.