Fujitsu 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.