Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Sheet-fed Scanner
by Fujitsu Imaging
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Our Price: $1,699.96 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $319.98 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Sheet-fed Scanner
Customer Review: Reviews & Questions Answered
Summary: 5 Stars
I have horrible problems with technology. I buy stuff, and after 4 hours of trying to get it to do what I thought it should do, it doesn't. HP does this to me all the time.
That is why I was floored when I got the S510 working in under 20 minutes exactly as I wanted it to.
You can take a bunch of pieces of paper, scan in both sides, capture it to PDF, OCR it, make it search-able, save it to disk... all by pressing one button.
I am using the ScanSnap filing system software that comes with it. It is essentially a glorified file explorer, except that it will do text in PDF searches for you based on the directory (Or Cabinet as they call it).
I set mine to extreme compression, and full resolution, and then the auto OCR. The software warns you that it will slow down scanning, and it does. It maxes out my 2-3 year old Dell D600 with .5G of RAM laptop, but it gets the job done. I can still use the computer so it doesn't block like I have read elsewhere (maybe for the S500).
This is an upgrade to the S500. Mine was black, not sure what's up with the white ones (maybe mac?).
It comes with Adobe Acrobat 8. This allows you to delete pages, rotate them, etc.
The OCR is amazing. Out of the box, it gets a little confused with i1IlL but so do I, bump it up to the max resolution, and the OCR is flawless.
I probably won't bother with the try & buy Rack2 Filer. Google Desktop isn't essential for searching.
In the hundreds of papers that I scanned over the weekend, I may have had 3 jams which are REALLY easy to clear, and the software is pretty smart about it.
If I had a newer / heftier computer, things would go A LOT faster (not the fault of the scanner or the software though, I watched my CPU spike and slow during scanning & OCR)
This literally was one of the only pieces of gear I have taken out of the box, and had 100% functional within the hour.
My .005% gripe; Be able to tell the scanner "Yeah, don't scan the backs of these pages" rather than navigate all through the menus. But disk is cheap, and I can always delete it with Acrobat later.
I'll recommend it to my friends & customers.
Customer Review: Good - but you may want to get newer model ** Revised comments **
Summary: 4 Stars
After reading all of the glowing reviews, I purchased this product at the end of February 2009 with the intent of using it primarily to scan in documents. However, I was in a pinch to digitalize photos for a digital frame that was being given as a gift, so I used it to scan in a few hundred photos. It did "OK" - as there was some loss of detail, and a lot of the edges of the scanned images were discolored - (perhaps the unit had gotten too hot). So, I'm still in the market for a photo scanner.
After the digital picture frame project, I moved on to my original plan - the scanning of documents. I have revised this review from my original - as I played around with the scanner some more and got it to work better. My revised recommendation is just to NOT use the "Auto Color Detection" option. Documents scanned in color turn out beautifully. Documents that contain just black & white suffer a tremendous loss of clarity under the "Auto Color Detection" mode, even at the highest quality setting. So, I recommend using the "Color" setting instead for all scanning, even if you know a lot of it will be just in black and white. Perhaps this means that the PDFs will be larger, but I'd prefer that to the bad quality I was seeing with the B&W mode. I have read that the newer model - the S1500 - does "gray-scale" (whereas the S510 does not). I am assuming that the gray-scale capability may address the poor quality seen in scanned black & white documents.
One more thing: Contrary to what others have said, I could not get "find" to work in Adobe Reader if I scanned in a document without enabling the OCR setting. When I re-scanned a document with that option on, then it worked. But, be advised that using that option slows down the scanning process quite a bit.
But all in all, I do (now) think that this is a terrific scanner for documents. I wanted to revised my rating from 4 to 5 stars, but that apparently is not permitted when a reviewer revises a review. REGARDLESS, check out the new model because it may be cheaper. Also check the Fujica website for a rebate form.
Also be advised that it cannot scan anything longer than 14 inches.
Customer Review: Great when it doesn't break
Summary: 1 Stars
I purchased this scanner a little over a year ago, and it performed beautifully....until a week ago when I got a standard paper-feed jam on a single sheet I was trying to scan. As I have done many times before, I opened the front, removed the sheet and reset the scanner. It fed the sheet in a couple inches and then gave me an error message stating "Failed to calibrate the scanner. The optical system on the scanner is in error" I tried another sheet with the same error message.
After several more tries, I called Fujitsu Tech Support who walked me through cleaning the glasses, rollers, etc.. I told her I had already done that, but we did it again. That did not fix the error, so she said the scanner would have to be repaired, and she would send a repair estimate. The repair estimate arrived: $260 labor + $49 return shipping + parts. So, a minimum of $309 plus whatever it costs for me to ship it to them. I paid a little over $400 for the scanner in the first place, and I certainly am not going to pay close to that, if not more, to get it fixed when I could buy a new one for about the same price - or so I thought.
Fujitsu is no longer making this model, and whoever has them left in stock is selling them for double their original retail price. There is a new replacement model for about the same price as the original S510 - the model S1500 - which I'm finding out is a piece of junk from the reviews I've read. It stands to reason, because why else would retailers have jacked up the price of the S510 if the replacement model is as good or better.
I have been looking online for about a week trying to find any help or repair sites, manuals, anything. There is very little out there. I've even posted this problem to the Fujitsu forums and have gotten no responses. As much as I really loved the speed of this scanner, I will not buy another. Any scanner that is so fragile that a single mis-fed sheet can cause a $300+ repair is not something I'm willing to invest in ever again. I caution everyone considering a Fujitsu scanner to take my situation into account before purchasing.
Customer Review: Awesome scanner
Summary: 5 Stars
I ordered this scanner a couple of months ago, and have been using it fairly extensively at work in a Finance dept. I am extremely pleased with this scanner. It is compact, sits neatly on my desk, can fold up when not needed, and is ready on a moment's notice. I just love its simplicity, just pop in a bunch of papers, hit the green PDF button and it whips through them in no time, literally just a few seconds per page. Great that it can scan both sides of the page at the same time. After scanning, it rotates all of the images to be right-side up, it deletes any blank pages (e.g. blank back-side of scanned pages), then prompts me whether I want to give it a custom file name or not (it automatically proposes a unique name based on system date/time), and whether I want to file it in a folder on my PC, pop it into an email, or whatever. Can't beat the speed and convenience. Very simple and well thought out.
Unlike the last reviewer, I had no trouble using this scanner with other programs - in my case it worked great with both PaperPort 10 and Omnipage 16. Of course you can also use it with the provided ScanSnap software, which is also very speedy and convenient. In fact, I prefer ScanSnap for my needs.
This scanner is the envy of everyone in the department that sees it. It is very reasonably priced, small and fast, fast fast! I think it is a great value, and has transformed how I handle paper in the office.
I also used it to scan business cards with the provided biz card scanning software. The software can easily send the scanned info into Outlook (I'm using Outlook 2007). It was OK, but it did have trouble recognizing biz cards with very small fonts, despite my slowing the scan speed down a bit to get the highest quality scan possible. I found myself making a couple of corrections to half the biz cards I scanned. But still worthwhile to use it if you have a big pile of cards to scan, or if this is a regular part of your daily job.
Customer Review: Fantastic workhorse of a scanner
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this scanner almost two years ago after moving house and having to deal with three large metal filing cabinets full of paper (about 30 linear feet of packed hanging files). After nearly breaking my back transporting them to a storage facility, I swore that I would never do it again: I would digitize everything.
My main requirements of a scanner were (1) it must be able to feed more than one page at a time, (2) it must scan in duplex and, (3) it won't cost me a fortune. I did my research and the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 pretty popped to the top of a very short list.
All I can say is WOW! This little workhorse of a scanner has been everything I could hope for and more. I put the entire contents of those filing cabinets through it (probably 20,000+ sheets of paper) and have since then scanned and stored every piece paper that has come across my desk and several shelves of books whose pages I liberated from their bindings (probably another 10,000 sheets). The scanner paid for itself in no time with just the storage fees I saved on those files.
Given the load I've put on this cute little scanner, I've expected it to die on me at almost any moment. If so, I would happily have shelled out another $500 for a new one without hesitation. But this little guy just keeps on scanning day after day without complaint.
The only slightly negative thing I can say about it is that even though it does a fairly good job of scanning photographs, it doesn't really match up against a flat-bed photo scanner for quality. If you quickly want to digitize a lot of photographs and quality isn't of paramount importance, then the S500 will do a fine job. But, if you want to get the best possible scans of your old photographs and don't mind spending the time needed to do so, then I suggest you get yourself a good flatbed photo scanner - I've been using an Epson 3490 for well over a year with no complaints.