More about Fujitsu’s ScanScap scanner

A couple of years ago I wrote about the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner and I'm still blown away by how good they are. A client of mine recently installed 5 of them (the S1300i model) and I have one on my desk.

Just a couple of things to add about this scanner:

• From what I can see, it no longer comes with the Adobe Acrobat software. It does come with ABBYY Fine Reader included as well as a bunch of other software.
• It can be set up to run OCR on the scanned pages so that the text is converted from an image to searchable text.
• In particular, I love the ability to scan business cards to the CardMinder software. It then reads the scanned card and extracts the details into its contact database. This is not perfect though so sometimes some manual correction is required afterwards but its way faster than typing up the whole card from scratch.
• The ScanSnap can be set up to scan directly to Google Docs as well as a number of other cloud based services.
• It has a very small footprint on your desk which is great for small offices where space is an issue.
• The ScanSnap is pricier than other scanners but what it does is save you time (which is money) and this alone justifies the price).
• This is a sheet-fed scanner which handles the majority of documents you're likely to work with but you couldn't scan bound books with it. You'd need a flat bed scanner for that but I think having a flat bed scanner alone is a false economy because they are so much slower at scanning documents that could be fed through a sheet-fed scanner. In a office with several users I'd recommend having the ScanSnap on each desk and a single flat bed scanner to be shared amongst staff.

For flatbed scanners, I recommend the Canon Canon CanoScan 4507B002 LiDE110 Color Image Scanner which is extremely affordable and the quality of scan is excellent. The really nifty feature I like is "Upright Scanning", that is, it can stand on its edge to reduce the footprint on your desk. It doesn't come with software though so you'd need your own pdf software for example.