Scanners For All: Fujitsu Makes PDF Scanning a Snap
We’ve looked at a variety of scanners before- from receipt scanners old and new to fingerprint models. Tomorrow, we’ll be looking at a couple of business card scanners, but today wanted to feature a more general model, perfect for small offices and businesses.
The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 is a pretty new model, released just a few months ago. We’ve already been impressed by a similar model before, the more portable S300, and were definitely interested in seeing if Fujitsu’s larger model could best the predecessor. The specs certainly sounded great- it’s reasonably compact at 16×10×9 inches or about the size of, yes, a breadbox (we never get to use that). It folds up nicely too as you can see below! The S1500 comes in two flavors, with software optimized for either Windows or Mac, though the hardware itself is the same and you can use either flavor with the other platform. It also offers double-sided simultaneous scanning to ease the pain, which can really help speed up processing otherwise lengthy batches of documents.
It comes with a large bundle of software, including Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard Edition, and some dedicated OCR and card-scanning software. We tried those latter programs, and they worked perfectly well, but were primarily interested in using the scanner with the touted direct-to-PDF functionality. Love or hate the format, it’s become standard for many businesses and we’re asked regularly for advice from lawyers and accountants for advice on enterprise-level scanning and becoming paperless, with an eye towards PDF creation. Of course, it scans quite nicely into JPG as well, but a scanner like this might be overkill for your average home- unless you plan on scanning a lot of documents or need something that can handle widely-varying documents.
One of our favorite parts of the scanner was the intelligent feeder system. We normally carefully separate documents into various piles- receipts, business cards, normal paper- but this scanner is one of the few automatic document feeders that we have seen that can handle those various paper forms and formats intermingled together without missing a beat. In our tests of random piles of paper, we were able to get a mis-feed once or twice, compared to nearly non-stop jams on our all-in-one multi-function scanners. Photos worked only OK, since they weren’t as crisp or high-resolution as on dedicated photo scanners, as this one goes up to a max of 600 dpi in color or 1200 dpi in monochrome.
Another great thing about the S1500 is the sheer speed. In lower-quality mode (150 dpi color or twice that in monochrome), it can churn through 20 pages per minute. That’s a page every three seconds, faster than most other scanners we’ve tried. Pages are automatically scanned at the appropriate resolution and type too, so black and white pages and scanned in black in white, and smaller documents like business cards are automatically input at a higher resolution. This model also offers greyscale detection, which we tested successfully though didn’t need very often. The ScanSnap also auto-rotates and straightens pretty well, so don’t worry if your documents are put in the feeder a bit crooked. It doesn’t handle business cards quite as well as the scanners we will be looking at tomorrow (the error rate was quite a bit higher, though scanning times lower, and addresses rarely came in well).
The feeder can handle 50 sheets, five times that of the portable S300, but we did notice that the more we filled it up, the more likely it was to jam. And it is a bit costly- around $400 or so, making it an investment. Luckily, the ScanSnap series seems pretty durable; we’ve been lugging around both models and they haven’t shown a scratch. The software isn’t perfect, but it is easy to setup, and the hardware more than compensates- the ScanSnap S1500 is the best all-around scanner we’ve used, and offers hassle-free performance, changing the way we scan.
