Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Sheet-fed Scanner by Fujitsu Imaging
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Digital camera reviews of Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Sheet-fed Scanner
Digital camera Review: Excellent Machine
Summary: 5 Stars
I have owned this for about six months and it is very good machine. Very fast and easy to use. I was at a clinic today and I noticed they had a scansnap on a number of the desks in the clinic.Digital camera Review: Excellent Scanner
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this to bring my small business paperless. It has exceeded all of my expectations. I haven't installed the rack2filer because the regular software does everything I need. I cant believe how small it is. I bought it on Amazon and got an additional rebate from the Fujitsu website so be sure to check that.Digital camera Review: Excellent Scanner - no WINDOWS 7 support caught me off guard
Summary: 5 Stars
I have tons of peripheral products and upgraded to Windows 7 32bit Ultimate and was surprised there is no support. This thing is a boat anchor now. Oh well, I guess I'll use my old Epson scanner for a while. It is three years old, but Epson was nice enough to patch together a W7 driver for it. Come on Fujitsu!Digital camera Review: Excellent Tool for Paperless Office
Summary: 5 Stars
I have a large collection or periodicals...magazines, journals, etc; which occupy way too much space on shelves in my basement. I only keep those periodicals which are reference types, not news and popular magazines, but still those worthy ones were slowly pushing into my available work space.
Several years ago, National Geographic decided to issue all their past issues in a CD-ROM set, with the promise of update CDs every couple of years. I went this way and dumped the magazines themselves. This was very nice, since besides saving lots of room, the latest CDs included an index of articles and subjects that included all issued back to the first one, so I could easily find anything they ever published. Unfortunately, not long after I went to this system, National Geographic had some sort of run-in with the various people who submit articles, over compensation for the CD-ROMs, and they ceased the CD program. That's another story, but it was a great idea and implementation. It got me thinking...
I waited a few years trying to decide how to get a similar result for all my other periodicals, but blanched at the thought of trying to scan page after page in my flat bed scanner. Even my trusty Canon MF6530 copier/scanner/printer (also reviewed here at Amazon), would be too slow or otherwise problematic for this task.
I finally settled on the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 document scanner. here was a machine designed specifically for what I wanted it to do, and nothing else. From all other reviews I read, people loved it and were having very good results. The machine seems to go for about $400 in most places, which seems like a lot for what you get, but it is important to remember that it comes bundled with a FULL version of Adobe Acrobat (not just the free reader program), which by itself goes for about $200. Looking at it this way, the scanner costs $200 for the machine.
This scanner is not designed for scanning odd sized and shaped items, although it can do them in a limited sort of way. You really need a flat bed scanner for those. This scanner is for rapidly scanning lots of regular sized pages arranged in stacks, as with a sheaf of papers. It is excellent for periodicals once the binding is removed....I ended up buying, online via eBay, a guillotine type paper cutter, also known as a 'ream cutter' and by several other names. This is a tool used by print shops and such to cleanly and accurately cut through many sheets of paper at once, on on the larger ones the user can cut through an entire ream of paper without fanning the pages or making a sloppy cut. The $150 one I bought can cut through a medium sized phone book but not a whole 500 sheet ream; in other words, excellent for books and periodicals. I place the volume in, crank down on the clamp that keeps the pages from fanning during the cutting process, then haul down on the large lever to shear through the paper. It cuts off just the very edge of the binding, leaving clean edged sheets of consistent size, losing no text (on photos that span one sheet to another, you would lose about 1/8" in the middle of the image). I mention this to be helpful to others contemplating the same scanning task.
With the ScanSanp on my desk, it opens (unfolds, really)from an 11" x 6" footprint in two quick hand movements. Opening it also turns it on, and it is ready to go instantly. I drop the stack of pages into the top chute and press the single large green button. The scanner driver pops up a box on the screen (which can be minimized if you don't want to look at it) and the scanning commences. The pages sail through very quickly, perhaps one sheet every 4 seconds. By 'sheet' I mean the actual piece of paper, which of course usually is printed on both sides, and hence is actually two (2) 'pages'. The scanner has identical scanning elements positioned both above and below the paper path, so it scans both sides at the same time as they pass through into the output tray below. The on-screen box shows the tally of the number of scanned pages.
Paper jams are infrequent. When they occur, it is because the paper is dusty and the rubber feed roller is getting slippery with the dust. The scanner driver detects this and halts, alerting you to open the scanner (a single button pops it open in a clamshell manner), clean the roller if necessary, replace the paper, and click an on-screen button to resume scanning. If done this way, the pages scanned before the jam are not lost, and you get an uninterrupted PDF file as if nothing had happened. If you go about clearing the jam any other way, you might need to use Acrobat later on to merge separate PDF files, each containing parts of the scan. I usually use a compressed air can to blow the dust off of the roller, but you can also use a clean rag, etc. If the roller gets really dirty, you might need to clean it with more attention, according to the instructions in the manual. Fujitsu also sells a kit to replace the components that eventually fail due to accumulation of crud from the paper, including the main roller. This is not expensive and the parts are all laid out and easy to reach when the scanner clamshell is opened.
The default result of a scan is a single PDF file per document. However, the scanner driver allows setting other preferences, including a separate PDF per sheet and other choices. You get pretty much the same choices you would with most other scanners.
You can also decide whether the scanner should try to correct for you mistakes. The scanner has the ability to straighten (in software) pages that might have fed through slightly askew, rotate pages that went in upside down, remove any blank pages, etc; For my periodicals, I have most of these turned off.
The scanner can also be set to automatically do an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) during the scan process. This is handy if you want the resulting files to be searchable in Acrobat, but it does slow down the scan. The OCR software also comes bundled with the scanner, or I believe you can decide to use you own existing OCR...don't quote me on this though, as I have not tried it.
You can tell the scanner driver to save the resulting files anywhere you choose, and it can automatically assign file names (much like a digital camera does with its image files), or you can type in the names manually.
I have found the scanner to work nearly flawlessly with paper ranging from newsprint to fairly heavy, glossy covers. Every once in a while I will hear the roller working on a problem page (almost always the thicker glossy ones)...it does a little dance back and forth to try and entice the page to move from the stack before it gives up and indicates a misfeed....and I can press down slightly on the top of the sheet to help it, but like i said this is infrequent.
The scan quality is excellent. Not really what you might get from the better flat bed scanners in high resolution mode, but very good for documents. It makes short work of the periodicals I put through it. This is one of those tools that does exactly what it is supposed to and does it very well.
I should point out one other thing that I am doing, besides shearing the bindings off as previously mentioned, to achieve my goal. I also database the articles. I have a speadsheet open on one part of the screen and the Acrobat open on another, and scroll through the scanned magazines while entering data on the articles and subjects I find, indexed back to the file names. This will allow me to find anything once the whole process is complete. I mention this as a reality check....many people think that once they scan something, their problems are over, but what they may really have in many situations is a bunch of computer files without any way to find out what's in them. You could use the scanner's little file management utility for this, but it would not be as comprehensive of flexible as one you make up on your own using a database or spreadsheet program you probably already own.
Digital camera Review: Excellent little scanner!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the best scanner I have ever purchased, period. I've had lots of scanners all the way from Visioneer's old sheet-fed PaperPort (which was a great little scanner, by the way) to flatbeds, to multi-function units. The last scanner I purchased was a Brother MFC with duplex scanning, and it works, but it's a pain because of the software, and then when Vista came out, the duplex function didn't work.
I bought this scanner based on the reviews, and today I scanned about 750 sheets of paper. Worked perfectly. Software, including full version of Adobe Acrobat 8, is great. Just load in the paper and push the button and WOW! It works as advertised!
And the footprint is small. It sits next to my monitor, and is so convenient. When not in use, you can fold everything up and it looks good and is small.
I scanned color documents and text documents. Single-sided and double-sided sheets. Worked great on all of them.
I am very, very pleased with this purchase. And like I said, I have owned and used dozens of scanners, and I say if you ever buy a scanner, get this one. It is well worth the expense!!