Xerox Scanners Altering Documents After Scanning


Of all of the things that can go wrong in a business to mess-up paperwork, the scanner used to not be much of an issue. Well, it appears as though some of those incorrect numbers on documents may have been the result of some Xerox scanners which have been found to change numbers on paperwork when certain settings are applied.

The glitch was noticed with Xerox’s PaperWork machines which may have had this issue for more than a couple of years leaving businesses with incorrect documents for quite a long time.

David Kriesel, a German computer scientist first discovered the issue when trying to scan some construction plans. After scanning he realized that the document which came out was not the same as the one that he had put into the scanner. Kriesel then posted about the issue on his blog and tried to figure out if more people were experiencing the same type of number switching glitch.

Xerox is currently trying to minimize the negative press regarding these issues by stating to the media that they are only a few individual people reporting these types of document alterations. However, there are likely quite a few people experiencing the issue whether they know it or not because it appears to happen by simply using the “normal” instead of “high” scan settings.

Turns out that many of the WorkCenter and ColorQube machines have an issue with their compression software which has since been addressed by Xerox. In order to try and fix all of these issues, Xerox has told customers to either reset their machines back to factory settings or apply a recently released software patch.

Although either of these options should in theory fix the scanning problems, the compression algorithm used is an industry-standard and is not going to be replaced anytime soon.

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