Customer Reviews
Miss your Paperport, Mac users? At last, a replacement.
I've never been inspired to write a review here on Amazon, but this little scanner did it. I'm a Mac user from way back, and I'm a paper packrat...always cutting out things from magazines & newspapers to save for future reference. So back when the Paperport came out (Mac only, at first...), I thought I'd finally found the way to clean up & keep up w/all my stacks of clippings. I just scanned 'em all into my Mac, and the P'port software helped me organize everything into folders & subfolders so I could find them again. Most importantly, it was fast...you fed a clipping into the roller scanner, & it was in your computer as fast as the scanner could roll it thru.
Then Paperport went PC-only, and my clippings stacks came back w/a vengeance.
I've been looking for a replacement for years, with little luck. I have a 'real' scanner, but the problem with it is it takes forever to scan stuff--which is good if you care about the quality, but if you're just trying to capture a quick image of something so you can find & refer to it later, it's just way too slow--even @ lowest resolution & b/w, etc.
So when I saw the reviews here on Amazon for the Snapscan, I went for it. And it works like a champ--it's fast, it's actually pretty good quality (even the fastest, low-quality scans) and it writes everything to PDF files--which save space, and are non-proprietary (which was a big issue w/the Paperport--if you didn't have the Pport SW, you couldn't view their files, unless you'd gone thru & converted each one laboriously to jpegs).
It also lets you scan stack of pages, too, so if you've got a 10-page magazine article, say, you can run the stack thru. Just make sure the pages are the same size & they all have clean edges.
Big bonus: Snapscan gives you the option to scan duplex or simplex...and duplex scans just as fast as single-sided.
The software's also pretty good, altho it doesn't have any of the organizing features that made the Pport so useful. But it comes with Acrobat, so you can edit the PDF's, and combine files, insert pages, crop images, create articles, highlight text, etc., etc. Setup was fast, and it worked right off. Only thing I could wish for here is that it would scan something longer than 14 inches...so if your input is longer than that, you have to chop it up to scan it, but you can put it back together again in Acrobat--at least well enough to read it & refer to it later.
Thanks, Fujitsu!
Easy to use for non-technical employees
In an office environment of 200+ people, a scanner that is "low maintenance" is high on the "IT Guy's" list.
This is the first scanner that I can honestly say is self explanatory, low maintenance, creates FAST high quality scans to PDF, with little to no intervention from the user.. hence no intervention from the IT guy. Expensive, but a great buy for saving time, hassle and frustration.
An office essential for us!
We bought Fujitisu ScanSnap scanner to help clear out our office of many banker boxes full of documents. This was money very well spent. In approximately a month, I scanned a minimum of 20 banker boxes. (This was in addition to my other office projects.) I can't even give an estimate as to how many reams of documents I've scanned since we purchased this in December 2004.
It's been almost a year and the scanner has been working strong! I can't believe how quickly it scans both sides of a sheet of paper. I've scanned various sizes of paper from letter to legal and even small memo sheets. Granted, I have to scan the different sizes separately, but at least it does scan them.
The only thing that I do find irritating is that I am not able to use the computer for other tasks while scanning because the ScanSnap continues to "take control" of the computer. My current workaround is to use two computers. One is for scanning documents and the other is for working on other projects. This could be an expensive work around, but we already had an available computer.
The technical support for the ScanSnap earned kudos from me as well. I misplaced the installation CD to install the scanner on the second computer and tried to find the information on the Fujitsu website. I had to call in to get the information. The woman I spoke with emailed me the FTP link while we were still on the telephone.
Would I buy this product again? Definitely. It is a nice small unit that barely takes up any space on my desk. The space cleared in the office is amazing. It's nice to know that the important papers are now converted to PDF and can be stored off-site to protect this information.
Another amazing thing is that we ordered this item on a Monday and received it in our office on a Friday!
