New toy
This is amazingly good value for money. I bought a Fujitsu Siemens SnapScan S510M this week.
The scanner is small, as you can see in the photo, where it is sitting next to the Mac Mini. When it’s not in use, it’s even smaller as the sheet feeder and the paper tray for the scanned documents both fold up flush with the body of the scanner. Folding it up switches it off, conversely unfolding it switches it back on.
It scans 18 pages / minute, double-sided at 300 pixels/inch, cost me 377 Euro and generates documents in JPEG or PDF format. It comes with Abbyy Fineprint, which means that you can perform OCR (optical character recognition) on the scanned documents as part of the scan workflow.
The really beautiful thing is that the software for the scanner automatically recognizes whether documents are in color or black and white and switches to the appropriate scanning mode automatically, and also recognizes whether paper is printed on one or both sides. Blank sides can be automatically deleted from the scanned document.
On my limited experience and experimenting of the last couple of days, I can only say that I wish I’d bought this a long time ago – it saves so much time compared to scanning manually (using a Canon Lide 80) or using a Brother multi-function scanner/printer/fax, which could only handle single-sided documents and was much slower than the ScanSnap.
If you don’t have a Mac, you can still enjoy the advantages of the ScanSnap – there is a model available without an “M” at the end of the name which is designed to work PCs. In fact, the PC model is somewhat cheaper, and can be upgraded free of charge to work with the Mac by following these steps.