I’ve already scanned hundreds of old snapshots that have been sitting in boxes for ages because it was too much hassle to scan them one-at-a-time on my old flatbed scanner.įinally, I just want to mention something I haven’t seen in any review. Great! The ScanSnap software includes the option to scan directly into iPhoto. Some people have asked how well it scans photos. Just dump a stack of papers in the feeder, press the button and walk away. But it’s not like you have to stand there and supervise. The scanner itself rips through a page in less two seconds (both sides!), so Fine Reader becomes the bottleneck if you you want to OCR a large number of documents. Yeah, Fine Reader is a little slow, even on my dual-core 2.4Ghz MacBook Pro, but by that I mean it takes about 10 seconds per page to produce a fully-searchable PDF. ![]() This scanner rocks, especially with the bundled OCR software. I must say it was hard to spend $495 on a scanner when you can buy a cheapie for $79. I bought this from Amazon just before Christmas after reading many reviews. It automatically converts the scans to PDFs and it’s blazing fast! It scans in color or B&W and does two sided scanning of stacks of paper. The Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M (The M is for the Mac version) goes for $430.23 ($510 list) and includes a full version of Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. Once I have time to sit down and setup my automated workflow, I’ll be one step closer to my paperless office (hey, I can dream can’t I?). So I’m happy with my purchase! It’s incredibly fast and worth the money! It would be nice if they offered an option for this model to buy just the hardware for those users (like me) who already own Acrobat, but they don’t (yet). It still begs the question of why do they include Acrobat 8 Professional and not tie into it though, especially since Acrobat 8 Professional can OCR directly?ÂĪlthough the ScanSnap doesn’t do what I want out of the box (see the update above), it is possible to setup with the supplied software. This app does exactly the one thing I was missing in that it OCRs the PDFs immediately after they are scanned by the ScanSnap (if you set it to do so). UPDATE: Thanks to blog reader “Vivek” for pointing out that the ScanSnap S510M does actually include a special version of Abbyy Fine Reader for Mac. Sure I can probably setup an Acrobat Batch Sequence, Mac OS X Automator thingy and a watched folder, but I just expected this kind automated solution out of the box. Instead, it scans the document, gives it a basic name and either dumps it into a folder as a scanned PDF or opens it in Acrobat and then you’d have to do all the work manually. If I later need that document, I want to be able to search on some words that were in the document. What I want is to be able to walk up to the scanner, stick a document on it, scan it and then walk away. While I’m OK with that, what I was hoping for was an automated way to have Acrobat then OCR the scanned PDF which would make it searchable. The scanner driver simply creates a PDF using the built-in Mac OS X Quartz driver. There is no tie between the scanner driver and Acrobat at all. Wow! I was thinking that they would take advantage of this powerful app and sadly they don’t. This scanner includes a FULL version of Acrobat 8 Professional. ![]() I must say that while the hardware rocks, I was a little disappointed in the software implementation. It’s just awesome! OK, so that’s the good part! I’ve been able to scan even small receipts without having to use the document carrier. It’s also more compact than I imagined and since I got mine they’ve even come out with a more compact model ( ScanSnap 300M) that would be suitable for travel. I’ve never seen a scanner that scans so FAST! Not only does it scan fast, it scans both sides of a page as fast as it scans one side. The ScanSnap S510M is an amazing piece of hardware. At the time I didn’t actually have mine yet and I promised a follow up review, so here it is: As you may remember I was pretty excited to order the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M after reading a review from one of my colleagues and talking with another colleague that used one.
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