I just received this scanner. I've been collecting a stack of documents to scan and finally ran out of excuses with its arrival. I settled in for a long evening of unpleasantness. I put the first batch of 6 pages into the hopper, pressed the Scan button expecting a sloooowww, painful grind. But....? Each sheet whipped through effortlessly! Both sides of the double sided sheets scanned on a single pass! Everything was oriented correctly and automatically and the legibility was excellent. How did they DO this? I'm used to scanning taking so long I continually forget what I'm doing before I'm done. This is a whole new experience. Suddenly, I'm seeing the real possiblity of reducing all my file cabinets to a few CDs in my lifetime. Wow.
This is about my 5th scanner (HP, Epson previously) but the very first one to take the agony out of scanning. And it's such a cute little machine. I never would have believed it could accomplish such a masterful job. It also handles legal sized documents - you fold the document in half, it scans both sides at once and marries them back together!
Thank heavens they brought this out for the Mac. ScanSnap S510M Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner
I am using this scanner mainly for food magazines. I have plans to make everything digitalized and then setup a computer in the kitchen. Anyway, I have a stack of magazines in hand. When I finished setting up the scanner, put a page in, press the Scan button on the machine... I kid you not, it took less than 5 seconds for the piece of paper to go through the scanner. At first I was like "is it doing some kind of warm up?" But then I saw on my computer screen that it's actually processing the scan... WOW. The quality was superb. It's just amazing.
OK, let's run it through the OCR. I wasn't sure what to expect. You know magazine pages have all sorts of images and texts and they're all overlapping each other. Anyway, it came out perfect, I mean, perfect. I don't know how these guys managed to do that. Although I have to say the color of the page after being OCRed is a bit degraded, but not very noticeable.
So I started tearing up the whole magazine, removing all the ad pages, and it became about 60 sheets / 120 pages. Stack them all up, hit the scan button. Man, that was SO effortless. I carefully torn out the pages so that the rugged sides were not too bad. I did have to sit next to the scanner to catch the pages coming out from it, because from time to time the rugged edges would cling onto each other and pushes the whole pile to the floor. Whatever, I can spare 2 mins doing that. I set it to OCR directly after scanning, so I can just walk away afterwards.
I also used the Acrobat Pro to remove any more ad pages that were included in duplex scanning.
The whole experience was surreal. This little cute machine gives home scanners a completely new definition. It makes all other less expensive scanners expensive, in terms of the time you save, and plus the software you get. Remember, you're receiving a copy of Acrobat Pro, not just Standard.
I have used the product for little over a month now with Apple Mac OS X Leopard. The first impulse I felt after seeing this ScanSnap in action was to get all my documents out of the drawer, scan them all and dispose off the space robbing file folders/boxes or whatchamacallit! It's one of the best investments I have made. It works flawlessly. It gives new meaning to the word "ease of use"! The inclusion of Adobe Acrobat 8 (not yet fully/officially supported on Leopard but so far works fine) itself is worth the price. Fujitsu seems to have understood very well the concept of "elegance in simplicity" so much espoused by Apple in its products and philosophy. This is one of those products where you can't think of anything to add to make it better!
I was on the fence about this scanner because it's a little pricey and I already have an all-in-one Epson flatbed scanner, however within the first few hours of using it I feel absolutely great about this purchase. For me, it's a "what is your time worth" problem. I keep paper copies of all of my statements, bills, etc. to the point that it's filled my 2-drawer filing cabinet and about half a dozen of the plastic tote filing bins you get at Office Depot. Seeing that this may be a tad ridiculous I realized that moving to electronic copies for most everything was the way to go. I'm a Mac power-user so I was expecting to be really critical of the software - too often apps are ported to the Mac with little care but Fujitsu did this right in that they developed for the Mac user. The Scanner hardware works really, really well and is successful in 99 out of a 100 docs on average - I have only had about 1 jam on an old mess of a document and it handled it perfectly the second time. As others have mentioned jams clear in an instant thanks to the well thought out design of the unit. Getting back to the software I am running Leopard on an Intel iMac and everything has been rock solid. It comes with the latest Acrobat if you want to get fancy but I've been happy just scanning to pdf's as fast as I can feed them through. The software is pretty flexible as to what the post-scan action to take is - you can instruct it to open in Acrobat or other apps (for example, I use Preview to do a quick QA check). I am really impressed with the stability of the driver and scan management software in combination with the hardware. Fujitsu's design philosophy is holistic and in the Mac spirit - you can literally be up and scanning within a few seconds of flipping the unit open showcasing the attention to detail in hardware/software integration. I have been delighted with being able to put a stack of 20 utility bills and watch them scan to a single pdf within seconds without a hitch - amazing!
Getting back to what is my time worth I have saved so much time by adopting a new means to organize and store my documents that within a weekend this machine paid for itself. As a new Dad, turning hours into minutes is priceless. Get this machine - it will bring about a very positive change in your workflow and save you space and time. - Fujitsu - Mac - Pdf - Osx'
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