Review submitted by BlueSquares
Author’s Rating:
The ScanSnap S1300 rocks and this page doesn’t do it justice.

BTW, the difference between the ScanSnap S300 and S1300 is simple.

S1300 works with PC and MAC. S300 only works with PC. Get the S1300.

It scans FAST and PDFs pop up on my PC immediately. It does OCR in the background while the PC is idle.

Great, great quality. My old Epson Perfection 1240 never scanned docs with such clarity.

One drawback…you can’t use TWAIN with the ScanSnap series. So no “import from scanner” in Photoshop.

But this things will scan a JPG that can you later open in Photoshop. No worries.

As a designer, I’m not impacted since I rarely scan anything in color these days.

(It does scan in full color, btw…really nice quality).

I’ll let the video show you real-world usage.

Personal stuff has been blurred.

You can watch it at you of the tube

and search for the following kB7268TGEng.

Review submitted by Debra Thayer
Author’s Rating:
This thing is fabulous! Best money I’ve spent all year. And the perfect time of year to scan my files and then put them in the fireplace to warm the house up. In addition to space-savings of boxes of paper files stored on a credit card size usb hard drive, I don’t have to remember where I put anything or agonize over where to file it. The OCR and search accuracy are stellar.

Review submitted by T. Souslin
Author’s Rating:
We have 2 ScanSnap 300Ms here, several 1500s and now I have the 1300 on my desk. This scanner works flawlessly.

It did take a little time for the rollers to work in, it wasn’t gripping paper right at the beginning, but after about a 100 scans everything fell into place.

Colors are good, resolution is great.

As a desk scanner – this is about as good as it gets.

Review submitted by Raymond A. Aragon
Author’s Rating:
I was thinking about the 1500M but then realized that the software was for Mac only and that making it work with a PC using the great software that is bundled would not be possible. Sure you can get the scanner to work but not all of ease of use features with profiles etc.

I like the Scan Snap software, it is easy to use. I did not use the manual to figure it out(beyond checking what needed to be installed).

You simply select active Profile for your scanning task and then it is a one-click affair.

Scan to a file

Scan to Evernote (I had to configure, very easy to-do)

Scan to email

Scan to Card-Iris

Scan to Word

Scan to Excel

etc.

Could this get any easier?

Page Per Minute:

8 supposedly but if you turn on the special PDF feature to make the document SEARCH-ABLE then the PPM goes down or at least the post-scan processing takes slightly longer.

Small size benefits:

* I like the ability to take it with me to a meeting where I know I will want to share notes

* small footprint on my desk (I like this)

* when you fold up the trays the 1300 is just a tiny little box

Small size issues:

* the paper tray cannot hold as many sheets as the larger models

* guide rails are small and papers can sometimes get fed in at an angle if your paper is curling up a little, I have to assume that with bigger guide rails that would help keep the paper straight

* if you have the space and you want to be able to do large batches of scans I have to assume the larger SCAN SNAPS would be a better choice (they can process more PPM too).

power from USB:

* the option to power form two USB ports is pretty nifty

* this feature is useful for people that travel and do some serious word warrior computing

Lastly, my use case (so that you can determine if my advice applies):

* I am a GTD user and scansnap is part of my process of processing my inbox (getting to zero).

* I scan a lot of stuff to evernote (magazine articles/notes/project related documents)

* I scan all my bills and tax related documents to an encrypted folder

* I scan business cards and use card iris to send to entourage

* My goal of FILING less stuff is a success thanks to the EASE of use of the Scan SNAP

* my goal of shredding old files after scanning is a success

I own other scanners, and they are PERFECT for scanning a few important documents for a task but not for BULK SCANNING jobs. WAY too many steps and too slow! I strongly recommend SCANSNAP scanners.

Review submitted by Mo Man Chicago
Author’s Rating:
I purchased this a few weeks ago and I run on a Mac Book Pro laptop.

1. The setup was super easy

2. the foot print is small

3. Pay attention to the fact that scanner ADF only supports 10 pages. Anything above that will stick together.

4. Once you are connected, put the paper in and press the blue button, it is a snap, no pun intended.

5. The software works well and is easy to use.

6. The scanner does align crooked paper. I have put business cards, receipts, airline tickets, cab receipts and they all work great.

Review submitted by Giovanni Bertani
Author’s Rating:
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.

Review submitted by Donald H. Mcclelland
Author’s Rating:
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, 3×5 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.

Review submitted by Bryan Hunt
Author’s Rating:
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.

Review submitted by Eugene I. Kim
Author’s Rating:
This is probably the most valuable hardware I have ever purchased for my Mac and for my office. I am considering purchasing a second one for my home as well. Now the machine looks clunky and large in the picture shown here, but the scanner can be folded down if you are not using it. Look for pictures of folded down machine. It is much more compact and nicer looking then it does on the above picture. That’s important too; after all, you want your desk to look neater and less cluttered after getting this machine.

I owned a Neat Receipts Mac scanner previously. S1500M is superior in every way; the difference is so great, I probably should not even compare them. Neat Receipts was agonizing slow and the OCR software was also slow and unreliable (often crashed). I was sorely disappointed. Good thing I tried the S1500M. I’ve owned this machine for a few months now and have scanned all kinds of documents. Fast and reliable scanning every time. ADF works flawless; never skips a page. Scans both sides of a page automatically when needed; I wasn’t even thinking about this feature when I purchased it, but boy that sure is a convenient feature to have.

Adobe Acrobat which came with the scanner is nice; but I recommend also getting Yep! (shareware which utilizes Spotlight — remember to enable Spotlight or it won’t work!) for previewing and organizing all the PDF files you will be creating. You can’t work efficiently without a great document scanner and organizer in the 21st century. Invaluable. Invaluable. Get it. Just do it.

UPDATE: Recently some ignorant clerk at the IRS sent me a document of about 20 pages stapled a bunch of times using a broken stapler (the staples were bent irregularly in multiple places). I took off 4 broken staples and ran the document through and realized that there were actually more broken staples in between the documents where it was not visible to me until it jammed my ScanSnap S1500M. It made a grinding noise and I was horrified to discover about 5 more broken stapes between the documents. I thought the S1500M was a sure gonner. After clearing all the jammed papers and staples, it went right back in to smooth action!!! The quality on this scanner is absolutely beautiful. Nevertheless, make sure you thoroughly check your documents before inserting them to your scanner ADF, especially the ones from IRS.

Review submitted by Ernest E. Svenson
Author’s Rating:
I’ve been using ScanSnaps since they first appeared on the horizon. Prior to that, I’d been on a serious quest to become totally paperless. I worked in a law firm and convinced them to get a scanner and I learned how to use it. The machine was large, complicated and expensive. If it hadn’t been so expensive I would have bought one for myself to use at home, but I just couldn’t justify it. When the ScanSnap was announced I realized that finally there was a scanner that could scan batches of documents at an affordable price. I assumed that there had to be a catch, and that would mean the scanner wasn’t quite top-notch.

I bought one anyway. I realized instantly that this was the holy grail of scanners. And, as I said, I’ve been using them ever since. Every one of these scanners has been a model of reliability. I’ve recommended these scanners to hundreds of people and every single person I’ve recommended it to has wound up falling in love with it. Like anything in the world of technology, it is best if you take the time to explore the settings and figure out how to make it work best for you. As a home scanner there is simply no other option, not in my view. The all-in-one machines are fine if you only want to scan a few things here and there. If you are going to scan stacks of documents then you need a real scanner.

How good is this scanner?

Well, like I said, I’m a lawyer and I’ve recommended this scanner to other lawyers and helped them set it up. Many other tech-savvy lawyers I know have discovered this scanner on their own. Lawyers as you may know, are huge devourers of paper. A couple of lawyers I know work in small firms where this is the only scanner. It can totally handle the workflow of paper that a small firm of lawyers receives. But, most of these firms quickly decide to get a scanner for each lawyer. And why not? It’s not that expensive, especially when you consider that it comes pre-loaded with Adobe Acrobat (which is normally a $200+ value). If you want to be paperless then you want to scan to PDF, and having Acrobat allows you to manipulate your PDFs (e.g. add signatures, insert pages, rotate pages, make sticky notes etc.).

I’ve used both the Mac version of this scanner and the Windows version and they are completely equivalent. They both work wonderfully. The Windows version of this scanner comes with wonderful software called ScanSnap Organizer, which makes it really easy to batch scan a bunch of different papers (e.g. bank statements, utility bills, receipts etc) and then later on put them into folders or whatever you want to do to organize things. The Mac version doesn’t come with this software, but there is a great program called ‘Yep’ (just google ‘yep mac software’ and you’ll find it) that costs about $34 and is even better (in my opinion) than the Organizer software that comes with the Windows version of the ScanSnap.

It’s rare in the world of technology that one product winds up dominating because it simply stands heads-and-shoulders above everything else that purports to compete with it. The Fujitsu ScanSnap is one such product. I advise a lot of lawyers about becoming paperless, and whenever I hear that someone has tried and failed to make the switch away from paper, I often find that the root problem is with their scanner. It’s either too powerful (and therefore too complicated), or it’s not powerful enough (e.g. the all-in-one device, and this is even true of the $10,000 high end multi-function devices). The ScanSnap is like the porridge in the Goldilocks fable: it’s just right.

Install the software, then plug it in and hook it to the computer. Configure it and then load a stack of paper. Try putting a letter in upside down and see what happens (it will auto rotate it to the proper orientation). It will straighten pages that you load crooked, and it will scan the front and back of pages at the same time. But it will toss out the back pages if they’re blank. It can scan in color or black & white. You can run OCR (optical character recognition) so that the document will be text-searchable (I don’t do this because it takes a little extra time and generally isn’t worth it, but you can do it easily if you want). If you get this and want more room on your desk then get rid of your fax machine and get a low-cost web based fax service like [...] which lets you send and receive faxes by email. You’ve got the Scanner and I presume you have an email account.

What are you waiting for? The paperless revolution awaits you, and all you need to make the first step is this Scanner.

Review submitted by D. Ryan
Author’s Rating:
I looked closely at the NeatReceipts scanner before deciding on this one, but think made the right call.

I have been a Visioneer fan for some time, and I saw one of the Strobes used in my doctor’s office and have been interested in one ever since.

The Strobes were overpriced so I never bought one, but broke down and got this one. I figured this was the low end of their line, since the documentation is for the RoadWarrior and the Strobe 100, but when I called Visioneer they told me this one has all the latest hardware in it and buying one of the other models would be a step backward. That made me feel better at least.

I should explain my decision: I used Quicken religiously and have always wanted a way to easily attach receipts to Quicken entries. (Older versions of Quicken had ways to, but they were all iffy and imperfect. Quicken 2007 does allow more direct scanning, although it, too, is pathetic but workable and does work with this scanner). I mention this because it seemed to me that the NeatReceipts scanner’s claim to fame is that it reads the receipts and stores them and you can search by them. That’s not ultimately what I need. My data is already sorted and I don’t need to OCR the receipts–just store them for when I want to see them. Plus, buying this scanner got me PaperPort 11 (I have been using 9, refusing to upgrade due to cost) at no additional cost, which I do use extensively also. A two-for-one deal!

The scanner is actually quite nice. It may not be perfect, or a flatbed, but when I truly look at what I want one for, this is it. I’ve scanned over 200 receipts with it already and dozens of other documents. It’s not as bulky or hard to place on my limited desk space as my old flatbed scanner (Visioneer 9320-USB). Plus, there’s no “warm up” time which I always hated.

However, on the flip side, After the unit scans the document quite quickly, it pops up “Converting”, which does take way too long for my taste. For a scan that takes say 10 seconds (for an 8.5×11), the conversion process takes 20-30. I THINK that time is dependent on what format you choose to scan to (i.e. Searchable PDFs take longer than PDFs), but I haven’t found a format that just “pops” in to Paperport without conversion (I’ll note here when you scan from Quicken 2007 into Quicken there is no conversion time–I like that!)

I have also scanned more than a few color photographs with this unit that have come out nicely. I was afraid this was mostly a B&W scanner, but it does well with color as well it seems.

As for difficulties feeding, I can say it is an art. I get more straight than crooked, and Paperport does do a good job straightening them for you, but it is annoying to have to start over. I wouldn’t let that “quirk” of this hardware deter you from choosing this unit.

All in all, I am pleased with this purchase and would recommend it to others considering it.

Review submitted by Jim G.
Author’s Rating:
I bought this scanner for my wife who originally just wanted something to scan in her recipe collection. I was torn between purchasing the RoadWarrior and the Pentax DS Mobile 600. I’m glad I bought this one. The software description of the Pentax is rather scant, so it’s hard to compare, but I believe the RoadWarrior wins in terms of flexibility. After using it for a while, my wife wanted to scan in her business card collection. The included BizCard application worked great. She also found the need to scan and OCR documents into Word. No problem. Photos…piece of cake. It has handled every task that we have thrown at it.

Some have complained about the difficulty of getting the scanner to feed straight. We have largely solved that problem by increasing the paper pickup delay to the max setting (1.25 seconds). Also the auto-straightening software is sometimes confused when the original contains a diagonal edge, but that feature is easily turned off.

Cons: When I first installed the scanner, I could not get it to calibrate properly and the scans had light streaks. I called Visioneer tech support and they guided me through downloading and installing a fix from their web site. After that things worked great. The software is a bit clunky (too many mouse clicks to get to the setting you want to change), but you get used to it.

As far as hardware requirements go, my wife runs this on a mini-ITX system with a rather weak processor (1 GHz Via processor, 256 MB). The software performs well even in that environment.

One last piece of advice: when creating pdfs, use the Paperport desktop as the destination for the scan rather than Acrobat Reader. It is much easier to stack and unstack things there as well as do other forms of editing like annotation and cropping.

Review submitted by Adam M. Snow
Author’s Rating:
This scanner is a great little portable mobile scanning tool. The OneTouch software is wonderful; it scans directly to an application or a file (I use it for PDF’s mainly) without ANY intervention. Simply inserting the paper starts the process and in seconds the document is on the PC. I’ve found the size, USB powered featurer and travel case wonderful for taking it alongside my laptop where it makes quick work of receipts. The scan speed is not as fast as desktop ADF but works well for portable use.

I tried the Neat Receipts solution but it was awfully slow, required very convoluted and large software components and much more complicated than this. Highly recommended for any mobile scanning use.

Review submitted by S. Sourelis
Author’s Rating:
Scans directly to PDF to open in Adobe Acrobat Reader. Scans photos well. I like that no AC power is needed, is USB powered. On the other hand, software is kind of buggy. At first, software install froze. Upon install, Paperport takes a long time to open. Once it does, works fine. Can scan both sides of page to one file.

Review submitted by John Schinter
Author’s Rating:
I Love this Scanner! It is extremely easy to use, simple and quite fast. It needs no external power, and only needs the USB port to work. Since it scans text as well as high resolution photo’s, it is perfect for eliminating all of those stored papers, articles, recipes, etc. that I had lying around and could never find when I needed them.

I especially like the bundled software – notably PAPERPORT 11. I have been a paperport user for more than 5 years, and cannot live without it anymore. Instead of MS explorer, Paperport creates little bitmaps of each document and allows easy visual views of documents.

Another GREAT bundled software program is the business card scanner. Whenever I go to business trips or, conferences, or seminars – I now scan all of my business cards as well as my travel receipts. The fields automatically populate off of the card, which then get transferred to my outlook contacts. NEVER MISS ANOTHER BUSINESS LEAD!

Again – A PERFECT portable scanner that sits in my home desk drawer until I need it – as well as my suitcase when I travel.

Would make a great gift for any executive in your family……