I have horrible problems with technology. I buy stuff, and after 4 hours of trying to get it to do what I thought it should do, it doesn't. HP does this to me all the time.
That is why I was floored when I got the S510 working in under 20 minutes exactly as I wanted it to.
You can take a bunch of pieces of paper, scan in both sides, capture it to PDF, OCR it, make it search-able, save it to disk... all by pressing one button.
I am using the ScanSnap filing system software that comes with it. It is essentially a glorified file explorer, except that it will do text in PDF searches for you based on the directory (Or Cabinet as they call it).
I set mine to extreme compression, and full resolution, and then the auto OCR. The software warns you that it will slow down scanning, and it does. It maxes out my 2-3 year old Dell D600 with .5G of RAM laptop, but it gets the job done. I can still use the computer so it doesn't block like I have read elsewhere (maybe for the S500).
This is an upgrade to the S500. Mine was black, not sure what's up with the white ones (maybe mac?).
It comes with Adobe Acrobat 8. This allows you to delete pages, rotate them, etc.
The OCR is amazing. Out of the box, it gets a little confused with i1IlL but so do I, bump it up to the max resolution, and the OCR is flawless.
I probably won't bother with the try & buy Rack2 Filer. Google Desktop isn't essential for searching.
In the hundreds of papers that I scanned over the weekend, I may have had 3 jams which are REALLY easy to clear, and the software is pretty smart about it.
If I had a newer / heftier computer, things would go A LOT faster (not the fault of the scanner or the software though, I watched my CPU spike and slow during scanning & OCR)
This literally was one of the only pieces of gear I have taken out of the box, and had 100% functional within the hour.
My .005% gripe; Be able to tell the scanner "Yeah, don't scan the backs of these pages" rather than navigate all through the menus. But disk is cheap, and I can always delete it with Acrobat later.
I'll recommend it to my friends & customers. Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Sheet-fed Scanner
I have used this scanner and its software for the last 7 months. It works extremely well, is very fast, has nearly perfect software, and is well worth the cost. The bundled software alone is worth quite a bit. Use the background OCR for scanned documents along with Google Desktop Search or similar and you will be able to find things in seconds most of the time.
I scan every piece of mail, receipt, or paper that I get. I can now realistically go paperless - this is what I've been waiting for.
It would be nice if it had standard driver interfaces or Linux support, but I'm very happy with it otherwise.
For the price of the product, and the advertised speeds and functions, you'd think all of your printed material could be fed into this scanner. You'd be wrong. Snapshots will jam in this device. You are locked into Fujitsu's software for scanning. And, you do not get TWAIN drivers for the device, so you cannot acquire images from this scanner when inside a program like Paint Shop Pro. This is a single-purpose scanner: feed it all of your sheets of paper, and it will convert them to PDFs. If you have a lot of paper, then this is your scanner. If you have a lot of mixed media, this is NOT your scanner. Find another automatic document feed (ADF) scanner with TWAIN driver support.
-C
A fast document scanner like this one can be a huge help in organizing your life. Six months ago, the S510 was about the only game in town for a reasonable price. Now, there may be better options, especially for rather heavy-duty users like me. The pluses have been well-written about, so I'll give only the minuses:
1) No Grey Scale! B/W is fine for pure text and some graphics, but is horrible with photos. In a publication with b/w photos, one is stuck with either copying in full color which results in large files, or manually switching between color mode and B/W mode since "Auto-Color Detect" senses color, not the presence of photos.
2) The paper input tray has fences that are too short. Pages tend to torque left as they feed. The paper output tray has no fences at all, which often means that the output pages get shifted around or kicked off onto the floor. The "De-skew" option can get confused if there is graphics on the page or if the printing is stylized.
3) The color scans are too light and there is no way to adjust the setting.
4) Japan has lousy paper. As a result, this scanner has a hard time with good quality paper as it's too thick.
5) Oft-used scan options are buried in strangely organized menus.
6) Inadequate cooling. A few cooling holes in the base along with rubber feet would fix the problem, but as it is, there is no airflow through the unit.
7) Life limit of 150,000 - 200,000 pages, possibly due to the bad cooling. There are now quite a few pixels missing from the scans; it's still okay for text, but irritating for illustrations.
It's doing the job, but I'd shop around were I looking for the same type of scanner today. - Pdf - Duplex - Scansnap - Fujitsu'
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