Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner for PC: Digital-Cameras-Photo.com

Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner for PC

Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner for PC
by Fujitsu Imaging

List Price: ~~$495.00~~
Our Price: $414.49
You Save: $80.51 (16%)
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Category: CE
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Customers in the UK, buy this product at amazon.co.uk for British Pounds

Digital Photo Product Details

Manufacturer: Fujitsu Imaging
Format: CD-ROM
Platform: Windows
Model: PA03586-B005
Product features:

One button searchable PDF creation
Intelligent paper feed detection
Blazing 20ppm color scanning
50-page Automatic Document Feeder (ADF)
Comes with Adobe Acrobat X Standard

Accessories:

Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner for PC

Customer Review: The little scanner that could (and does!)
Summary: 5 Stars

Background:
I bought this scanner to functionally replace the scanner that is integrated into my multifunction printer. The printer's scanner was okay as far as it goes, and gets good reviews by users, but it never quite lived up to my hopes and expectations. Two-sided scanning in particular was slow and unreliable. I use the scanner for basically making my home filing paperless. Bills, statements, etc.
For me, speed and ease of use are the hopes that led me to buy the ScanSnap. I'm not speaking of speed strictly in terms of raw PPM scanning. Certainly the PPM affects overall speed, but start-to-finish time, which includes workflow and user interface elements - like the software, the need to babysit, how it handles double-sided scanning, the frequency of double-feeds, and double-feed handling when they do occur. 95% of my scanning is B&W. Everything ends up in PDFs. I store my scans in folders and I don't like to keep them in a proprietary document management format.

Experience:
After using the scanner for 2 months, these are what I consider the important features and takeaways:

Initial impact: Upon opening the box, I was a bit shocked at just how small the scanner is. It is a bit like a transformer in this regard. To "transform" into a scanner, you flip open the top panel (which becomes the paper input tray), and optionally flip out the bottom panel (which becomes the paper output tray). Once opened, a glowing blue Scan button is presented as the only electronic control on the whole device (its use is pretty obvious). That's it. You flip the panels back and it transforms into a small toaster sized box. (If you don't close it back up, the scanner will faintly flash at you when it goes to sleep - for me, the flash is mildly annoying at night, so I generally close it up, which basically turns it off.) The design is very impressive in its elegance and effectiveness. Grade: A+ (this is more coolness factor for me, but if you have limited desk space, it could be an important consideration)

Raw scan speed: Very fast. I have not timed it, but I can say that this fully meets (perhaps exceeds) my expectations and needs. Grade: A

Warm-up time: This is something that was kind of a drag with my MF printer. The first scan would require a minute or two of warm-up time before it would start scanning. For the SnapScan, the warm-up time is either zero, or if there is one it is less than 5 seconds. Grade: A+

Setup: In order to get the most out of the scanner, you may need to set up different profiles that correspond to different types of scanning that you do. Each profile can be associated with different settings (dpi, b&w vs. grayscale vs. color, two-sided, whether to OCR, where to store files, whether to send the scan to an outside application). In practice, I find that 90%+ of my scanning uses a single profile: Scans to Adobe Acrobat (included), b&w, duplex (two-sided), ocr on, auto paper size detection. The remaining 10% is scanned to printer (basically, photocopy) and scan to email. It takes a bit of time to set this up (I got carried away when I first got it and set up too many profiles, several of which that have never been used). Anyway, it's easy to do. I might recommend only building 1-4 profiles and then add as you see needs. Grade: A

Scan Reliability: Very few double-feeds. Every time there was a double-feed (maybe twice in the past 2 months), it detected it and provides clear prompts on how to recover. Very good and much better than my MF printer. Grade: A

Workflow: This is the guts of where I wanted to see improvement over my previous scanner. There are different ways one could engineer the workflow. This is how I do mine: I grab a big stack of "stuff" to scan (bills, statements, kid's report cards, etc.) Some of it is two-sided, some of it isn't - doesn't matter. Some of it is letter sized, some of it is legal, some of it is 4"x6", some of it is portrait, some of it is landscape - again, it doesn't matter. The only thing that would lead me to make a separate pile is if it wasn't for b&w scanning (very little of what I do). I take the stack of papers, throw it on the scanner and hit Scan. I then walk away and let the scanner do its thing. Note that second-side scanning is completely automated, and it doesn't have to reverse the page and rescan - it gets it all in one fell swoop. Very cool.
Because of how I configured it, a secondary OCR process automatically kicks in to make the PDFs searchable. If you don't need that, turn off OCR and you won't have time to walk away from the scanner unless you have a huge stack of material.

With this approach to workflow, everything is scanned into one big Adobe PDF in Acrobat. Click on the Page icon on the left side of the screen, and you will see mini version of each page in the PDF document. If there are any page 2s that you don't want (often stray marks or unneeded text on the back of the page causes the page 2 scan to be retained when you don't really need it), simply ctrl-¬click them in the page-icon panel and hit delete to remove them. Since I want to keep each scan in a separate file, I then ctrl-click each individual document in the page-icon panel and then right click to "Extract." Tell it the name and location to save the PDF document, and cycle through until I'm done. (Tip: If you put into your paste-buffer the path of the location to save it can make this process faster.)

Workflow is significantly improved over my previous scanner. Being able to simply stack different documents together without regard to size, orientation, and two-sidedness is a huge time saver. Grade: A- (minus is because of OCR time; perhaps that is unfair to the scanner, but hey, I am a demanding consumer ;) )

Overall, a highly satisfactory purchase. It's unusual for me to be as pleased about a purchase as I am with this (that demanding consumer thing). My scanning gets done because it's fast and it's easy to do. That's what I wanted, and that's what I got.

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