PURPOSE: To prevent an injury of a sheet when a sheet is separated and transported to a prescribed position while circulating in the desired number of times by changing separation and feed of a sheet after the second round from the first round.

CONSTITUTION: It is provided with a separation part 15 to separate a sheet M loaded on a document loading tray 5 from the lowermost part and feed it to a platen glass 3. The fed sheet M is circulated and discharged on the document loading tray 5, and this operation is repeated in the desired number of times. The separation part 15 separates the sheet M after the second round with changed separating condition from the first round. Hereby, after the second round of better separability, the sheet M can be separated with gentle separating condition compared with that of the first round, and hence an injury and a stain of the sheet M due to separation is reduced.