Avision AV-220 sheetfed scanner and Linux

Especially for gpl-violations.org, I've been dealing with more and more paperwork in my office. Such paperwork for example includes scanning signed contracts consisting of many pages, before being able to fax/email/.. them in advance of the original document.

So far I've been using a good old Canon flatbed scanner for this job, but with 20-page documents this gets increasingly annoying (and time-consuming) over time.

So I've been pondering to buy one of these HP Paper-to-PDF devices (forgot their name), where you can just put in a bunch of paper and it would email you the result as PDF. Unfortunately they're quite expensive, and even used ones (with probably half-way damaged mechanics) are very rarely found on eBay.

Now I discovered (and bought) an Avision AV-220, which is a sheetfed scanner that can scan up to 50 sheets (at 25sheets/minute). To my biggest surprise, that device actually contains two image sensors, so it can scan duplex in one go (unlike a laser printer where for duplex you have mechanics that rotate a page and process it a second time for the backside).

Thanks to the Avision SANE back-end (by Exactcode), there is excellent Free Software support for the device, too.

And what made the biggest impression on me: They actually ship the scanner with a small rubber/plastic spare part. "Please replace this after 15,000 pages". Isn't that great? I've never bought a laser printer or similar mechanical device that included a replacement of any wearing part.