Great tool. What a scanner should be. This is another world from the speed and software efficiency you have in the average scanner and All In One Printers. So I am happy to have both a AIO device and this great tool for document management.
My use:
Now all the invoices and in general, all my printed documents are converted into searchable pdf into an easy to access archive.
I can recover from a fax or a printed document and edit it in word or excel tables or iWork and save a lot of time retyping
Business cards are archived in a short time and included in my address book and so also on my iPhone.
PLUS
A single, easy to use, application manages the very fast scanning and efficient OCR conversion of printed documents outputting directly in searchable PDF, Word, Excel, email attachment, address book and VCF contacts. Also business card OCR is quiet effective and the limit is due to strange character and graphics and you can find on some more creative cards.
Compared to what you find in the AIO devices and average scanners, paper handling is superior and errors are avoided. In the case of skipped pages (Happens rarely) a sensor warns you and show you which page is missing.
CONS
Only shortcoming is that Acrobat Pro is included in version 8.0 and not the last 9.0 but I suppose that this will change soon. Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner for the Macintosh
But I mean this in a good way. The ScanSnap S1500M gobbles up piles of paper at an amazing rate. One-side or two-side scanning takes the same time. I have put just about every type of paper through it, often of mixed sizes and types (e.g., legal and letter size, 3x5 cards, newspaper and magazine clippings, unfolded brochures). A carrier sheet is available for crumpled, folded, or extremely thin paper. I've only had one paper jam (an odd-shaped, somewhat crumpled page that I ran without using the carrier sheet). Clearing jams is trivially easy because of the almost straight-through paper path. I am amazed by the quality of the scans. Photos sometimes look better than the originals. It small and almost silent. The software is easy to use. I have seldom, if ever, had a computer peripheral that I was as happy with.
I've scanned approximately 15,000 pages with this scanner and it couldn't have been easier. I did get the occasional "paper jam" when the sheet feeder picked up the next page as it was feeding the current page. Clearing a jam is trivial: pop the cover open, remove the pages, snap the cover back, continue scanning. Considering I was feeding in papers from 15 - 20 years ago, I expected the pages to occasionally stick together. This scanner is worth every penny.
I'm a proud new owner of a ScanSnap S1500M. I've owned many flatbed scanners and a multifunction device with a scanner, and I have to say the ScanSnap is among the best. Like most people, I've been digitizing my documents to reduce clutter. However, with my flatbed scanner, it gets very tedious to open the lid, flip the page, then click on the scanning software to continue scanning. A few pages takes a lot of time to digitize. With my ADF-equipped scanners, it was more hands-free, but the scans tended to be skewed. In all my past scanners, I could not search my PDFs.
My ScanSnap arrived a few days ago, and I've scanned several hundred pages. It is absolutely fast, no joke. Another reviewer said it's a paper eater (to denote scanning speed). It really munches on paper quickly. Actually, it is so quick, I spend more time preparing the documents (unstaple, arrange, etc.) than running it through the scanner. Plus, Fujitsu did a great job with the footprint. It is a very small scanner. Just a little bit wider than a sheet of paper, and maybe half as tall as the long side of a sheet of paper. The trays also fold in, so it looks like a small rectangular block when it's all folded in. The sheet feeding tends to be pretty straight. It did jam a few times, but they tend to be on thin sheets of paper. In case of a jam, there is a compartment you open up, just like un-jamming an office photocopier. Overall, I am very pleased with the scanner device.
The reason I gave it an overall 4 Stars is because their software needs some improvements. First of all, there's no Organizer software that provides the added usability of the PC version. If you go on YouTube, and search for S1500M, you will notice they are pitching the S1500 (PC version). In comparing the software capabilities from the video to what I actually got, I really would like the Organizer. As it is, when you press the Scan button on your scanner, it will invoke ScanSnap Manager on your Mac. That piece of software only lets you control what will happen when the Scan button is pressed (Save to a Folder, Send to Word, Quality settings, ...). But, what happens after the scan is not organized for you.
Open the YouTube video address below, then skip to the time 2:10. It talks about Send to ScanSnap Organizer folder. That's not in the Mac version, consequently, the Mac version doesn't get the View, Crop, and Highlight features in ScanSnap Organizer. Why?
[...]
Another complaint is that unlike the PC version, the Mac version only comes with Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Pro (PC comes with 9.0), although I think 8.0 is pretty good already.
The Searchable PDF feature is great. The OCR is pretty good. Here's the bad part though, and I think it's related to not having Organizer. To make the scans searchable, you have to turn on the "Convert to Searchable PDF" checkbox in the ScanSnap Manager's "File option" tab. When you load your documents and press Scan, the software will create the PDF, then there's another step to run it through OCR. If you scan in low volume, just a few sheets at a time, you'll be okay. But I scan 50-150 pages at a time. The ten or so seconds to OCR a page adds up to tens of minutes per batch. During the time it does OCR, you cannot continue scanning!!! Believe me, I tried but the Scan button does nothing while OCR is working. That's not good at all. I would rather scan my next batch, then queue up the OCR jobs. That way, I can scan everything now, then go to lunch or leave it running overnight, then it's done when I get back. But with their current setup, you will have to sit by your desk to wait until you can do your next batch. It's kind of like the old days of printing. Can you imagine yourself printing a big document, then being unable to tell MS Word to print the next document until the first one finished? It's kind of like that. Think about it.
Overall, I absolutely love the scanner device. I think it's great. Good job for putting two scanning units to make double-sided scans in one pass. The software is okay. It is missing an Organizer found in the PC version. The OCR is pretty accurate, but when scanning big batches, the OCR process will bottleneck your next batch to scan. If you're like many who are buying a fast scanner because you have many file cabinets of paper to scan, you will find that bottleneck very annoying.
Now, if Fujitsu could fix those limitations for S1500M users, then my complaints disappear and they would deserve a 5 Star rating. If anyone else has similar experience, please add a Note to Fujitsu section in your review. Hopefully Fujitsu will get the idea and work on it.
NOTE TO FUJITSU: Please have a Mac version of ScanSnap Organizer available for S1500M owners. Also, please enhance your software to include a Scan Job Queueing capability, so that people can scan their next job while the software is crunching another job. Kind of like how printing used to be one at a time, but later it could be Queued into a spooler so that users can get on with their job right away. Those would make your scanners unbeatable. Please strongly consider. - Document Scanner - Scansnap - Fujitsu - Scanner'
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