Fujitsu's ScanSnap

Bridging the gap between desktop and portable.

Price: £350

Manufacturer: Fujitsu

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Verdict

Pros:

Small footprint; excellent software; colour duplex scanning.

Cons:
Paper handling is compromised by small size; expensive.

Verdict:
If you've always wanted to clear your desk of paper, this product offers a simple way to start the process.

Kelvyn Taylor, PC Magazine 11 Sep 2003

Fujitsu's ScanSnap! tries to bridge the gap between desktop colour scanners and small, but less versatile, business card scanners. It's a sheet-feed, A4 duplex, 24-bit colour scanner with a USB 1.1 interface and a footprint that's about the same as an A4 sheet of paper. The ScanSnap! also offers scan speeds of up to 15ppm (150dpi simplex colour) and a maximum output resolution of 300spi (300 by 300spi optical resolution), making it a handy tool to help clear your desktop of paper clutter.

With this in mind, Fujitsu bundles the ScanSnap! with a full version of Adobe Acrobat 5.0 - the ScanSnap! driver interfaces directly to this and can send your scans straight to Acrobat. This means you can create (and edit) colour PDFs of your documents at the press of a button. There's also a useful PDF Thumbnail Viewer for Windows ME/2000/XP. Acrobat 5.0 retails for over £200 (inc. VAT), so the apparently high purchase price of the ScanSnap! is a bit misleading. Acrobat 6.0 has now been launched, but according to Fujitsu, the bundle won't be updated to include version 6.0 for about three months. Upgrading from Acrobat 5.0 to 6.0 will cost you about £80 (ex. VAT), so if you really want the new version, it might be worth waiting.

On the front of the machine are just two buttons labelled Simplex and Duplex, highlighting one of the smartest features of the ScanSnap! - single-pass duplex colour scanning. Documents are placed in the top-loading hopper, which can hold 50 pages of A4 photocopy paper, and scanned in a straight path to a pull-out tray in the base. Using twin-scanning CCDs, paper only needs to be passed through once for both sides to be scanned - a feature normally associated with high-end, sheet-fed document scanners. The feeder mechanism works reasonably well, but we found that it doesn't hold documents securely, due to the adjustable paper guides, which occasionally leads to misfeeds or misaligned scans.

There's no TWAIN or ISIS driver provided for the ScanSnap!, as all scan settings are provided by the driver via a System Tray utility. This includes several smart configurable features, including automatic noise reduction, page rotation and blank page removal. You can also set the scan quality, colour mode and compression settings for colour files. In colour mode, you can create JPEG output files rather than PDFs if you wish and send these directly to any compatible application.

One excellent utility shipped with the ScanSnap! is CardMinder, which is used to organise scans of business cards. Pushing the paper guides together forms a hopper for you to insert about 10 ordinary business cards.

Scan these in duplex mode and you'll also get any notes you made on the back of them. CardMinder also automatically does optical character recognition (OCR) on printed text on the cards, in addition to intelligently rotating them the right way round. We found CardMinder to be surprisingly accurate on a wide range of cards, although you can edit the information manually, if needed. Contacts can be exported to Outlook, Outlook Express, ACT!, Goldmine or CSV formats.

One thing you'll need to budget for with the ScanSnap! is consumables - the pick roller and pad assembly in the automatic document feeder need to be replaced after 50,000 and 10,000 sheets, respectively. No pricing for these was available at the time of writing, but Fujitsu said they were in the order of 'a couple of pounds' each.

Overall, the ScanSnap! an excellent and innovative product - once you've tried, you'll wonder how you lived without it.

Contact: Fujitsu Europe (0208) 573 4444
www.fel.fujitsu.com

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