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Fujitsu Scansnap S300 Review

By on August 21, 2009 in Technology

scansnap-s300Fujitsu deserve some credit for this scanner – which they accurately bill as “the world’s smallest duplex ADF (automatic document feeder) scanner”. Anyone who’s had scanners over the years know that they aren’t known for their compactness or portability. My first scanner was a Samsung (I think) A4 flatbed, may it rest in pieces, and my current Brother MFC 7820N takes up more space than pretty much anything else in my office. What Fujitsu have done is create a very good, portable, duplex document scanner. Emphasis on the word “document” is intentional, as we will see.

A quick look at the scanner’s official product page will give you the low down on its tech specs.

The scanner weighs a smidgeon over 3lbs. Pretty light for a scanner, but you’ll certainly notice it in your briefcase or bag. The 3lbs also doesn’t include the power adaptor, which is entirely optional as the scanner can be powered solely by USB. It does require 2 USB connectors to be connected however, one for power and one for data transfer. I don’t find this at all surprising, I have a portable 2.5″ hard drive that needs 3! …..I should really replace that.

The S300 supports full duplex scanning, i.e. the scan takes only one pass to scan both sides of a document. It also supports 4 scanning modes; Normal, Better, Best and Excellent. Scanning speeds vary from Colour (150dpi) or B&W (300dpi) at 8ppm (16 sides per minute) to Colour (600dpi) or B&W (1200dpi) at 0.5ppm. For most archival purposes, B&W at 300dpi gives you a small file size with high OCR accuracy.

The S300 supports PDF only as its output file type. This means if you’re looking for a photo scanner, you should perhaps look elsewhere, but it is ideally suited to paperless home/office/car environments.

As with all ScanSnaps, the lack of a TWAIN driver means that you are restricted to using the bundled ScanSnap software to capture your document. I’ve been talking to an engineer at Fujitsu over the last week to see what software vendors like myself can do. The ScanManager software features what they refer to as “Scan Profiles”, these are predefined settings for a type of scan. In order to get a Scansnap to work with another application like Home Document Manager, a user has simply to configure a “Home Document Manager” profile which deposits the PDFs in to a folder. The user needs then to configure Home Document Manager to monitor this folder. The snag is that this isn’t currently supported, but last night’s release clears the decks for this, so it is my next priority and would hope to have it in place within a week or so.

I will post an update with instructions when this is ready.

The ScanSnap also has built in OCR functionality. It will slow your scan down, but a document needs to be OCR’d somewhere. The OCR quality is comparable to Home Document Manager’s OCR, so it’s really a matter of preference whether you let the S300 take care of OCR, or leave it to Home Document Manager.

All in all, if you need either a small and/or portable scanner, you would be hard pressed to top the S300.

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Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Review

By on July 24, 2009 in Technology

Fujitsu-ScanSnap-S510-Duplex-ScannerThe Fujitsu Scansnap S510 is a dedicated duplex document scanner, built on top of the successful Scansnap S500. The S510 retains all of its predecessor’s strengths, and improves its offering in key areas, especially speed. I’m not aware of a scanner that come close to beating the S510 in terms of performance, with its 50 sheet automatic document feeder with automatic duplex scanning, and an impressive speed of 18 pages per minute. It’s worth reiterating – this isn’t a flatbed, if you need a more versatile scanner, you could try the Canon CanoScan 8800F.

The S510 is not without its problems, however. The scanner ships with an impressive software bundle, but the lack of TWAIN and WIA drivers means that you either like the software bundle it comes with, or you lump it. I’m not sure of Fujitsu’s logic, but the Scansnaps will not work  with other software applications (like Home Document Manager, OneNote etc). This isn’t Fujitsu’s policy across their entire scanner range, but it does seem to be the case across all Scansnaps.

Technologically, the scanner is sound. But it is let down by the fact that you have work work the way they want you to work, rather than how you want to work. The software bundled also boasts the ability to output the scanned documents directly to Word or Excel files. Whilst this sounds good in theory, the resulting documents contain so many errors that it ends up being frustrating rather than useful.  There are also many reports of users failing to get the scanner to work on Vista 64 bit, which, again, is a glaring hole.

All in all, I’d have to give it 3 out of 5. It would have scored higher, but restricting users to a particular way of working is not acceptable. We paperless enthusiasts take our systems very seriously, and who are Fujitsu to say they know better.

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Shredder Review – The Fellowes Powershred p-48c

By on July 10, 2009 in Technology

P48CMy tired, old trusty Draper PS3 shredder has finally refused to actually cut paper, choosing to score it instead. That’s OK though, because I’ve been dying for an excuse to get one of these new fangled cross cut shredders. After a bit of rootling around, reading a few user comments etc, I opted for the “Fellowes Powershred p-48c Cross Cut Paper Shredder“. Catchy.

The first thing that struck me in comparison to the Draper dinosaur that I’d just marched out of the office, was the quality of construction. It feels solid, more like a complete unit than the flimsy Draper. The shredder sits securely atop a decent sized bin.

There is a power switch on the back of the unit, as well as an auto/off/reverse switch on top. There is also a pretty decent safety switch on top to stop little fingers playing with it – especially useful if like me, your office is in the family home. According to the safety symbols on top, things not to put through it include children, hands, hair, ties and aerosols.

The cutters function very well. It can handle between 6 and 8 pages at a time, and copes just fine with staples and even credit cards. I managed to find an old credit card to give it a whirl, it demolished it entirely, cutting it into the same sized strips (3.9mm x 50mm) that the shredder creates of paper.

The only possible criticisms are that it would be nice if it were a smidgeon quieter. It would also be good if it would come with a small starter bottle of oil.

You can pick these up in the UK for between £30 and £40 and between $60 and $70 in the US.

All in all, 4 out of 5. A good purchase.

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