Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M - document scanner

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• Average user rating: 4.5 stars out of 1 review
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• 9 stars

  It Just works!

  by mikesiler on April 14, 2008

  Pros: Fast, Mac compatible, Small footprint, portable

  Cons: The Business Card OCR software needs updating

  Summary: I?ve been frustrated and have not had a good paperless solution since Mac OS9 and the Visioneer PaperPort sheetfeed scanner and software combo of 10 years ago. Flatbed scanners ...

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  Summary: I?ve been frustrated and have not had a good paperless solution since Mac OS9 and the Visioneer PaperPort sheetfeed scanner and software combo of 10 years ago. Flatbed scanners are way too slow for any practical use and until now, any kind of portable sheetfeed scanner has just been some sort of PC workaround with a Twain driver that was mediocre at best. I got close with the DocketPort 465, but it just isn?t the ?Mac? experience. Nothing ever seemed to work right. Until Now.
  
  I had held off from trying the big brother to this new sheetfeed scanner (the S510M) because of size, footprint, and price. So when the S300M was introduced recently at nearly half the price of its bigger brother I bought one. I paid $250.
  
  The footprint is fairly small and fits behind my keyboard on the rollout keyboard tray on my desk. So in my case, 0 footprint. It sits right at 3? tall with the unit closed. Just right for my keyboard tray. The unit stays off until you raise the feed lid so this solution is perfect for my use. It comes on and works instantly when called upon. Very nice. The scan button actually works. So many of the scanners on the market have buttons of some sort that mostly don?t work with Macs and seem to only work when hooked to a PC. This is a 100% Mac product and it works like one.
  
  Very fast! When compared to a flatbed scanner the speed of this unit is off the scale. You can?t really even compare the two. Load up several sheets, hit the scan button and it sucks them up and spits them out without a glitch. Sheets that are weathered and wrinkled feed well. It takes business cards without so much as a hesitation and is much faster than the DocketPort 465 while scanning both sides of the document not just one side like the DocketPort. When on the highest quality, color photo, it slows down about how you would expect, but even then, many times faster than the flatbeds I am use to. Well beyond acceptable.
  
  Ease of Use. Outstanding! The default settings are all automatic and they work without a flaw. Auto paper detection, auto color/B&W detection, size detection etc. However you can set up personal type settings very easily. I set up several ?profiles? for the way I use it. It comes with several very nice profiles for emailing, printing directly to your printer (as in copier), one for iPhoto that works very well, and A few others. But even nicer is how well it works with other software. It plays very nicely. For instance, I use a program called Receipt Wallet and Document Wallet that it works with flawlessly and automatically after you set them up. (all of about 3 steps to do that) Anything I scan opens in the software I dictated in the profile for me to work on from that point on like they were made for one another. I would guess any software that reads PDF or JPEG will work. So far they all have for me. I also set up a profile to use the scanner as a very nice fax machine for work. I?ve never had that feature work easier. The Mac has always done this very nicely if you had the document on your computer, now it?s not such a pain to get it in there! I downloaded and tried it with Pagesender and it worked just fine as a fax solution but I uninstalled that software as I couldn?t justify another $40 for a feature that OS X has built in.
  
  It also comes with business card reader software that you set up as yet another profile. But Cardiris for Scansnap is in my opinion mediocre at best. The S300M does a great job at getting it into the OCR software, but it is so not a Mac product. It is a really weak attempt of the PC version although it does do what it says. It reads the card fairly accurately and enters it into Address Book or Entourage without a problem. I was able to load a stack of business cards into the ScanSnap S300M feeder, it sucked them in and spit them out and I had the data from the cards in my contact manager in short order. I just felt like I was using a really second rate piece of software. The scanner works so well you just want to feel that way about the card reader software too.
  
  The scanner is marketed as a portable scanner and seems like it would do that very nicely. However for my use, it is the perfect personal home/business scanner. I was so impressed I?m going to buy its bigger brother for my office. With this unit I can get rid of my fax machine, copier, and forget about the all-in-one printer that takes up way too much space. This enables you to do it all with a decent laser printer.
  
  The double sided scan is wasted on me but was very cool when I did use it. I won?t have too much need to take advantage of that. I did have a 6 page double sided document that I sent as a fax and it did save me a lot of time over my normal fax trying to feed and keep all the pages straight. It sent 12 pages like that was the way it was suppose to be and I didn?t have to do a thing to make that happen. Again, very nice.

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