My sheet feeding scanner always jams when it has anything other than perfect copier paper in a stack. For folded, odd sizes, fragile, dirty, stapled, glued, torn, other paper, etc., it just doesn't work. Ya also have to constantly clean the platen with alcohol, or your scans get vertical lines on them.
(It's the same problem with a sheet feeding printer. If the printer paper isn't perfect, it jams.)
I agree that a dual side sheet feeder is awesome when it works.
Yeah, I have a ton of stuff I'd like to scan and have scanned some of it. But very little of it is in the category of just load in the hopper and you're done. And once you're looking at scanning hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of stuff and attaching metadata to it, it's pretty much a matter of laying down until the desire to digitize it goes away.
As a side note, I've been involved in a project to digitize the back issues of a student newspaper I was involved with. It's all a combination of very labor intensive and expensive (given the issues that they only have bound copies of are a real pain to scan even with an expensive large format flatbed scanner).
The Fujitsu ScanSnap sheet fed scanner we have is pretty forgiving with what will successfully run through it. It was about $550 with a full version of acrobat.
I see the commercial version of these at drug stores and hospitals, so I'm guessing that the robust flexibility for scanning isn't unique to my experience.
I don't know. Our (I'm sure multi-K$) Xerox copier/scanners in the office are pretty temperamental if you don't give them fairly clean stacks of paper to scan--especially double-sided.
(It's the same problem with a sheet feeding printer. If the printer paper isn't perfect, it jams.)
I agree that a dual side sheet feeder is awesome when it works.