Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Sheet-fed Scanner
by Fujitsu Imaging
|
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 |
|---|
Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Sheet-fed Scanner
Customer Review: About so-so
Summary: 3 Stars
To be fair, I use this as a work scanner, primarily. When I came to the company I work for now, there was a large amount of legacy documentation that was contained in binders that I wanted to add to searchable PDFs for client download. Makes sense, right?
Well, a full computer swap, two hours' worth of time hanging out on the phone with Fujitsu support, running through the entire litany of getting drivers for Windows 7, and I'm wishing that either Fujitsu got over themselves and made it easier to use the damn thing, or that my company had bought an Epson Workmate.
First, the scanner doesn't (as everyone else has noted) use TWAIN drivers. It's a proprietary software that makes this thing work, and while you can theoretically hack it using a Japanese driver to run Mac, the support isn't native on any machine.
Photos scanned were standard 4X6 and 5X7s, and went right to PDF - which means I have to break them apart to get them out of the PDFs and into a usable format. Not horrible, just another step in the process.
Linux support. Ha. Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.
Large stacks of paper: yep, it handles that. It does handle anything paperish I throw at it, but stiff cardboard / thick items are clunked.
For my personal purchase I'll be getting something else; for now this is an older, decent machine that I managed to get to work with what I needed it to do. The full five stars goes for the footprint; Fujitsu did get that right, and that's something that Epson's fat butt can't seem to wrap their heads around.
Since I'm working on digitizing all of my old records, and will be moving towards doing so for my fiancee's stuff as well, I think it will likely be that I roll out an Epson Workmate for my next scanning toy. I'll certainly NOT recommend this to my father, whose business needs to scan multiple documents.
Customer Review: Great way to get rid of piles of paper
Summary: 5 Stars
We've had the ScanSnap for going on 4 months now, and I'm a complete convert. I'm one of those people who always had piles of mail on his desk. I have no problem opening mail, it's the filing it somewhere afterward that has been a problem for me. So, until we got this thing, bank statements and 'changes in terms' forms and shipping invoices and all manner of things just ended up in piles in my office. Some sitting on top of the filing cabinet. :-)
Now, though, I just scan whatever it is and save it to a directory on my computer. The scanner prepends the date and time to the filename it creates when you scan something. So, if you scan a water bill, it will suggest saving it as something like "2008_09_10_14_20.pdf". I keep the year, month and day and would save it as "2008_09_10-WaterBill.pdf" and save it to my UtilityBills directory. I can find things much faster this way than I can in my actual filing cabinet.
I shred everything after I've scanned it, and presto - no more piles of paper.
The quality of the scans is excellent. I generally leave the text-recognition off (makes smaller files with it off), but I know I could always print the document and re-scan it with text recognition on if I need to make a searchable document. We've also used it to sign forms when our bank emailed us some PDFs. We printed them, signed them, scanned them back as PDFs and emailed them back to the bank. Done! Better quality than a fax machine, too.
Scanning-wise, I've had surprisingly little trouble getting multiple sheets of paper to go through properly. In the past, I've always fought with cheap fax machines to get them to feed properly. So far, the paper feeding mechanism on this thing has been wonderful.
I highly recommend the ScanSnap if, like me, you have trouble organizing all the paper statements that come in to your life.
Customer Review: Good for College
Summary: 5 Stars
I was very impressed at how well this scanner can handle handwritten notes. They are on lined paper, which is not as clear as white copy paper. It's not a problem for the ScanSnap S510. I set it to Black and White and "Better" quality, and was able to scan 70 pages of notes in a matter of minutes. They came out crisp and legible, and when I was done, the PDF was only 3.6MB!
Jams do happen from time to time, because the rollers run the paper through so quickly. But it's easy to fix. Also, the scanner comes with a carrier sheet, for scanning newspapers and large documents, or preventing "multi-feeds" (when the feeder doesn't feed a single sheet like it's supposed to).
It's possible that a more expensive model would have a better feeder that wouldn't jam. Documents that were folded can be hard to feed. However, the scans are so quick and so impressive that it's forgivable.
Be advised that there are no TWAIN drivers for this scanner. You have to use ScanSnap Manager. The software is intelligent enough to rotate images automatically, and detect skew automatically and correct it. This is very nice to have. There appears to be some integration between the software and the hardware. For example, when you push the green SCAN button on the scanner, the software can detect whether there is a document in the scanner. If there is no paper, it will alert you.
I haven't tried the OCR so I can't comment on it. Instead, I use Adobe Acrobat to do OCR. In general, you shouldn't need an excessively high resolution to do it like some reviewers mentioned; 300 DPI is sufficient. Higher resolutions will simply require more processing time.
I highly recommend the ScanSnap S510. If you have a lot of paper documents, the ScanSnap S510 can help you.
Customer Review: Incredible scanner
Summary: 5 Stars
I work with documents for a living and often need to scan hundreds of pages of documents from a variety of sources in a single session. The ScanSnap has improved my life immeasurably.
The fastest speed scan is blindingly fast, but you need perfect source material to use it -- if your document was stapled, on lightweight paper, or otherwise imperfect, the scanner will suck up pages so fast that you will have a jam or skipped pages due to more than one page feeding at a time. Fortunately, the second-fastest setting is still phenomenally fast and virtually eliminates all such paper-feed problems.
In addition to stacks of paper, I also use the ScanSnap for some non-standard uses with great success. For instance, I have cut books apart with an exacto and scanned the pages so that I can search the book. The scanner had very little problem accepting the cut pages, even when some edges were ragged. I also cut up some magazines (for the same reason) and the scanner handled the much lighter paper stock with no problem.
The software is fine, though not great. It does allow you pretty good recovery from mishaps -- i.e., you don't have to start over if you hit a paper jam or other complication.
I don't use the OCR so I can't comment on its strength or weakness -- I use and strongly recommend Acrobat for this purpose. Its OCR is the best I have tried and it's a must for anyone who has serious document management needs. Fortunately, the ScanSnap comes with Acrobat 8 Standard, and for most users, this is plenty of power.
Note that Acrobat 9 Standard cost $269 new, so this is a significant addition to the value of the scanner, which is pricier than many other models, but well worth it, in my opinion.
Customer Review: Almost Great
Summary: 3 Stars
A fast document scanner like this one can be a huge help in organizing your life. Six months ago, the S510 was about the only game in town for a reasonable price. Now, there may be better options, especially for rather heavy-duty users like me. The pluses have been well-written about, so I'll give only the minuses:
1) No Grey Scale! B/W is fine for pure text and some graphics, but is horrible with photos. In a publication with b/w photos, one is stuck with either copying in full color which results in large files, or manually switching between color mode and B/W mode since "Auto-Color Detect" senses color, not the presence of photos.
2) The paper input tray has fences that are too short. Pages tend to torque left as they feed. The paper output tray has no fences at all, which often means that the output pages get shifted around or kicked off onto the floor. The "De-skew" option can get confused if there is graphics on the page or if the printing is stylized.
3) The color scans are too light and there is no way to adjust the setting.
4) Japan has lousy paper. As a result, this scanner has a hard time with good quality paper as it's too thick.
5) Oft-used scan options are buried in strangely organized menus.
6) Inadequate cooling. A few cooling holes in the base along with rubber feet would fix the problem, but as it is, there is no airflow through the unit.
7) Life limit of 150,000 - 200,000 pages, possibly due to the bad cooling. There are now quite a few pixels missing from the scans; it's still okay for text, but irritating for illustrations.
It's doing the job, but I'd shop around were I looking for the same type of scanner today.