Designed with a curvy-yet-chunky physique, the 4824FN sports a mono laser printer combined with an A4 flatbed scanner and a 30 page Automatic Document Feeder (ADF).

The paper tray can hold up to 250 sheets at a time. A second 250 sheet tray can be fitted as an optional extra, increasing the height of the device.

As with most multi-function devices, the device’s control panel extends across almost the whole width. Its mono LCD display holds 2 lines of 16 characters. The navigation disk allows for easy menu access and the panel has the standard numeric keypad for faxing. On the far right of the panel are large start and stop buttons. The Samsun also has a nice “ID Scan” button, which allows you to scan one side of an ID card, turn it over and scan the reverse, before printing boths sides on a single sheet.

The SCX-4824FN has a fairly standard port configuration, featuring USB and ethernet for PC connectivity, as well as an RJ11 socket for the fax line, and a socket for an optional handset.

Samsung has a history of writing good TWAIN drivers and the SCX-4824FN is no exception. The device works happily with Home Document Manager, and produces good quality scans.

The only gripe I can think of is that the drum and toner cartridges come in two sizes, offering either 2000 or 5000 pages, but the starter cartridge that ships with it provides only 700. It’s no secret that printer manufacturers make a lot of money on consumables – but if you print as infrequently as I do, you might find that replacing your printer to be more cost-effective than replacing your toner.

All in all, I like this device – it’s a solid addition to any small or home office. 4 out of 5.

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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.

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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